NEW NVIDIA CHIP WAS ‘PRETTY MUCH’ MADE IN INDIA

Anand Parthasarathy, Bangalore
The Hindu Business Line

In line with strong media expectation, Apple has turned to graphics processor leader NVIDIA for chipsets to fuel its entire portable computer range, unveiled on Tuesday.

Business Line had suggested on Tuesday that this small shift away from CPU-centric chip sets in mainstream personal computing was imminent (‘Apple’s new notebooks may mark chip course correction, this page, October 14).

The chip set whose internal code name is MCP 79 and which is now being used by the entire Apple MacBook family, has become globally available as NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (the M stands for the mobile version; the chip is also available as 9400 for desktop applications).

It integrates graphics as well as hard disk and peripheral control functions in a single slab of silicon.

This small lurch towards a more graphics-intensive general purpose PC has an India angle: The GeForce 9400 series was almost wholly designed and developed by Bangalore-based engineers of NVIDIA.

“From architecture to delivery for fabrication, Indian engineers did pretty much everything,” said Sridhar Manthani, NVIDIA’s Senior Director for R&D in India, in a special briefing on Wednesday.

While the hardware work was almost wholly done here, US and other centres helped with the software and the ‘bring up’ — jargon for readying for the final rollout from a silicon foundry, he added.

The India design and development team — about 70 engineers in all — have been working on the 9400 chip since April 2007.

Apple said on launch that the 9400M processors provided “revolutionary 3D graphics” and enabled the company to deliver five-fold improvements in graphic performance over earlier versions of its notebooks.

The new models include improved MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models.