Nvidia officially introduced today the GeForce 9400 and 9300 motherboard GPUs for desktop PCs on the Intel platform.

According to the company, the new desktop GPUs integrate full system I/O and discrete-level performance in one-half the size of previous integrated graphics solutions. The Nvidia 9400/9300 desktop GPUs feature a 16-core CUDA-capable graphics architecture and will enable mainstream PC users to play the latest PC games and high-definition Blu-ray video playback without breaking the bank, Nvidia claims.

"By doing so much parallel processing on a single chip, they can accelerate the new visual computing applications people are getting, and at a reasonable price. The GeForce 9400 and 9300 mGPUs set a new standard for what users should expect from today?s more mainstream desktop systems," said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

"We?ve combined the power of three different chips into one highly compact and efficient GPU," said Drew Henry, general manager of MCP business unit at NVIDIA. "In doing so, we?ve redefined the level of performance people can expect from a motherboard solution to enrich visual computing experiences for mainstream systems. You can now have the performance of a discrete GPU in a small form factor PC."GPUs have long been essential platforms for rendering real-time images to computer screens, but software developers and system manufacturers have only recently begun using their parallel processing power to deliver a new level of performance for a variety of visual computing applications, including Adobe Creative Suite 4 and BadaBoom. Badaboom is a video transcoding application to speed up application performance and free up the PC for doing other tasks in parallel.

The new NVIDIA GeForce 9-Series motherboard GPUs feature:

- 16-cores for processing DirectX 10 games and CUDA-accelerated applications
- Video playback with NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology, which offloads 100% of all video processing from the CPU to the GPU
- Support for advanced audio and video connectivity, including uncompressed LPCM 7.1 audio, dual-link DVI, and HDMI
- Support for NVIDIA Hybrid SLI Technology
- Single-chip design with much smaller footprint

Motherboards featuring GeForce 9-Series motherboard GPUs are shipping this month from ASUS, ECS, EVGA, Foxconn, Galaxy, Gigabyte, J&W, MSI, Onda, Zotac, and XFX.

As gamers, video enthusiasts, designers, and now creative professionals require optimized PC solutions, the new NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU promises to offer a 5x performance increase over integrated core-logic to today's notebook designs.

"With this new GPU, NVIDIA is able to expand its market footprint from gamers and design professionals to the creative generation of users, as well as firmly establish us at the heart of the fastest growing PC market?the notebook PC," said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president, GPU business at NVIDIA

Apple has adopted this new GPU for its new Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air, announced yesterday.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M is a single chip, highly integrated design that is ideal for notebooks and smaller computing devices. It features 16 parallel processing cores that deliver a 54 GFLOPs of processing power. It also delivers up to 5x faster graphics performance than Intel Centrino 2, according to Nvidia. The GPU alsohas low power requirements allowing consumers to watch a full-length HD movie on a single charge.The integrated chip supports the Intel Core 2 family, Pentium D/4, and Celeron D with LGA775. It has 16 graphics cores each one clocked at 580Mhz, with shaders to be clocked at 1400MHz. The supported FSB is 1,333MHz, while the supported memory is DDR2-800/DDR3-1333.

DirectX 10,PureVideo HD, Hybrid SLI, CUDA, and PhysX are also supported.

Below you can see the basic specifications and the block diagram of the Nvidia 9400M GPU.