Nvidia ships 'first' 80nm mobile graphics chip

Nvidia has introduced what it claims is the first notebook-oriented graphics chip fabbed at 80nm, the mid-range GeForce Go 7700. It will initially feature in Asus A8 laptop family.

The GPU contains 12 pixel pipelines, four more than the 90nm GeForce Go 7600, which explains the new chip's higher fill rate - 5.4bn pixels per second to the 7600's 3.6bn. The two parts can both process 550m vertices every second, and they each have a 16GBps memory bandwidth, indicating identical RAM clock speeds. The 7700 connects to video memory across a 128-bit, dual-channel bus.

However, the 90nm GeForce Go 7600 GT runs to 19.2GBps, 6bn pixels per second and 610m vertices per second, so it clearly delivers greater performance than the new chip, despite the lower model number.

The 7700 supports DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0, high-dynamic range lighting, H.264 video decode acceleraion, PureVideo, CineFX 4.0, and Windows Vista readiness - in short, everything you'd expect from a modern Nvidia GPU. ®