As we discussed yesterday with AMD’s latest round of GPU rebadges, both AMD and NVIDIA are locked into playing the OEM rebadge game in order to fulfill their OEM partner’s calendar driven schedules. OEMs want to do yearly updates (regardless of where the technical product cycle really is), so when the calendar doesn’t line up with the technology this is achieved through rebadges of existing products. In turn these OEMs put pressure on component suppliers to rebadge too, so that when consumers compare the specs of this year’s “new” model to last year’s model the former look newer. The end result is that both AMD and NVIDIA need to play this game or find themselves locked out of the OEM market.

In any case, the bulk of these rebadges coincide with CES, which is where the OEMs announce their calendar-refresh products. We often see the specs for these systems leak out a couple of months in advance – and accordingly see the product numbers for the rebadged components they contain – but it’s not until CES that AMD and NVIDIA publish the specs of these products. So we’ve known these products were coming, we just haven’t had any solid details about them until now.

Jumping right into things, this morning NVIDIA updated their GeForce product page with a link to a PDF with the specifications for two new mobile products: GeForce GT 730M and GeForce 710M. NVIDIA’s PDF doesn’t go into great detail – in particular they aren’t listing the clockspeeds at this time – but from the specs provided we can divine some more information about these first members of the 700M family.

NVIDIA GeForce 700M Series GPU Specification Comparison
  NVIDIA GeForce GT 730M NVIDIA GeForce 710M
Was 640M? 620M?
Stream Processors 384? 96?
Texture Units 32? 16?
ROPs 16? 4?
Core Clock ? ?
Boost Clock ? ?
Memory Clock ? GDDR5 / DDR3 ? DDR3
Memory Bus Width 128-bit? 128-bit?
VRAM ? ?
Transistor Count 1.17B 585M
GPU GK107 GF117
Manufacturing Process TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm
Architecture Kepler Fermi

For the time being we have a few unknowns and a few assumptions on our parts, but based on NVIDIA’s specs and naming scheme we are very confident about which GPUs are actually behind these products. The 730M is some kind of GK107 rebadge – almost certainly 640M – as evidenced by its support for Kepler family features such as TXAA, PCIe 3.0, and DisplayPort 1.2. We beiieve this to be 640M in particular based on the use of both GDDR5 and DDR3 and the product name, though a 650M rebadge is also a possibility due to the very similar features of those parts.

The other part on NVIDIA’s current 700M series list is the GeForce 710M. This we believe to be a GF117 rebadge – almost certainly 620M – as evidenced by its lack of support for Kepler family features such as PCIe 3.0, TXAA, or support for resolutions over 2560x1600. This means that yes, just like the 600M series, the 700M series will contain some last-generation Fermi parts too, so any hope of a unified mobile family have been dashed by this product. Like the 620M this is a DDR3-only part, and exists as NVIDIA’s entry-level part over Intel’s iGPUs.

It’s interesting to note that in lieu of clockspeeds (or really any other hard details) NVIDIA is listing something called the “GeForce Performance Score”, which is defined as the performance of the part relative to Intel’s HD4000 iGPU. The 730M and 710M are 4.8x and 3.0x respectively, and while NVIDIA is almost certainly being overgenerous in their performance estimations here, it does lend further proof to these being GK107 and GF117 rebadges.

Finally, although NVIDIA has only published information on the 730M and 710M so far, based on previous experience we believe that this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the coming weeks (if not days) we would expect to see more mobile rebadges, along with some kind of desktop rebadge. We’ll keep our eyes peeled, so until they stay tuned.

Source: NVIDIA GeForce Product Page

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  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link

    And another one more thing, I know you read it in the article, then repeated it here. So at least you sponged like a lemming without thinking.
  • mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link

    Have fun playing games at 1080p on intel iGPU.
  • HollyDOL - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link

    You mean "Have fun playing SLIDESHOW ..." right? :-)
  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link

    Ugh. There's a reason I quit buying Nvidia products, I am a brainwashed stupid amd fanboy just like my buddy in the amd rebrand story where I declared I only buy amd after complaining nVidia rebrands are confusing, because I thought I bought one thing and instead I bought something else, being the idiot consumer all the lovely angels here complain to try to protect.
    However, I'm such an idiot and a fanboy I ignore amd's rebranding and just drool satisfyingly at my amd mouse cursor bug and GSOD's knowing my smaller market dying amd bankrupt brand with bad drivers is not confusing because any amd card is a GREAT CARD !

    FTFY
  • n13L5 - Friday, February 8, 2013 - link

    Quoting from the article: "The end result is that both AMD and NVIDIA need to play this game or find themselves locked out of the OEM market."

    You do realize that there is nobody else besides AMD and NVIDIA that OEM's could go to buy graphics cards from?

    AMD and NVIDIA are playing that fraudulent game voluntarily, in hopes to push more sales for themselves through conning consumers into thinking they're getting something new inside new laptops.

    Must have been a very clever PR guy talk our Anandtech reporter into believing this bs...

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