Renewed fortunes
So on the whole this appears to be a wholly positive development for NVIDIA. It has managed to debut in the critical notebook IGP market with a product that it claims is five times better than the best Intel has to offer at no extra cost or power draw.
In one fell swoop it has captured the MacBook market, which is not insignificant, but the real coup for NVIDIA will be if it starts to steal significant market share from Intel in the mobile PC market - and that includes netbooks.
As AMD has historically found, having superior technology is no guarantee of success when your main competitor's marketing budget is ten zillion times bigger than yours. So making a viable product is only the first part of the challenge for NVIDIA.
But if it can convince enough OEMs to build systems containing the 9400M then this could be the start of renewed fortunes NVIDIA. Hass seemed confident: "The majority of OEMs will have systems out by the end of the year," he said.
NVIDIA's share price is currently around a quarter of what it was at the start of the year. It's quite possible that the launch of the 9400M and the Apple deal that came with it will mark a turning of the corner in NVIDIA's fortunes.
