NVIDIA Readies Turing Powered MX450 Entry-Level Discrete Notebook GPU To Tackle Intel’s Xe DG1 & AMD’s 7nm Vega Integrated GPUs

[Super Galaxy?]

NVIDIA is preparing the successor to its Pascal-based GeForce MX 300 series entry-level mobility graphics chips which will feature the Turing GPU architecture. The MX series of GPUs target entry-level notebook designs, featuring a mix of low power and good graphics performance but they've yet to see architecture parity with the higher-end GeForce Desktop & Mobility parts.NVIDIA has refreshed its Turing based GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX lineup on both desktop and notebook fronts. With the likes of the RTX 2080 SUPER (Max-Q / Max-P), they currently dominate the high-end and even the mainstream segment with little to no effort by AMD's RTG to compete against them with its own Navi based lineup which has yet to be seen in action in this space. But, there's one market where NVIDIA's GPU efforts are getting crushed by the day and that's the iGPU side of things.

 

Intel's Ice Lake with Gen 11 and AMD's enhanced Vega GPUs have allowed notebook GPU makers to stop relying on NVIDIA's discrete GPUs as these modern integrated solutions offer great graphics performance and don't require excess power or cooling requirements in a notebook. While NVIDIA has been trying to release and refresh its GeForce MX lineup to get the attention of laptop vendors, it's efforts have mostly been to release parts based on the previous generation Pascal architecture.

 

NVIDIA's most recent GeForce MX300 series chips are based on the Pascal GP107 and Pascal GP108 architecture and while the specifications have seen a good boost along with a performance with up to a 70% boost over AMD's Ryzen 'Picasso' based CPUs Intel's Ice Lake CPUs, both Intel & AMD are not sitting ducks and will be updating its notebook iGPU lineup in the coming months. AMD already did so with the release of its Ryzen 4000 lineup which offers up to 95% performance of the GeForce MX350 with much lower power requirements since it shares its TDP with the 25W Renoir Ryzen 7 4800U APU. The Ryzen 7 4800U isn't even the best chip in AMD's lineup with the Ryzen 9 4900U & the Ryzen 9 4900H taking it up a notch in total graphics horsepower versus NVIDIA's GeForce MX GPUs.

Intel, on the other hand, is also preparing its Tiger Lake-U processors which will deliver 2x the GPU performance uplift over Skylake's Gen 12 GPUs. The new Xe DG1 GPUs are expected to deliver very good performance numbers in a integrated design and are expected to launch in the second half of 2020.

 

So how will NVIDIA tackle these two opponents with pose a large threat to their entry-level efforts? The answer is with Turing. NVIDIA's next MX GPU has leaked out by ROGame, a TU117 GPU based part that has a base clock of 540 MHz and up to 2 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 10 Gbps. The chip has a TDP of under 25W so similar to the current GeForce MX350 but it would definitely offer much better performance.