NVIDIA's GeForce 700M Family: Full Details and Specs
With spring now well under way and the pending launch of Intel's Haswell chips, OEMs always like to have “new” parts across the board, and so once more we're getting a new series of chips from NVIDIA, the 700M parts.
Context & Ripple Effects
NVIDIA has run this playbook before: the GeForce 8800M GTX brought desktop-class gaming to notebooks back in 2007, and mobile GeForce refreshes have tracked the notebook cycle ever since. The 700M family follows the same rhythm, arriving just as OEMs prepare Haswell-based laptop lines.
The timing is the story. With Intel's Haswell launch pending and Ivy Bridge already powering the MacBook Air and Windows 8 ultrabooks, NVIDIA needs fresh '700M' branding on spec sheets so OEMs can advertise new graphics across the board rather than let Intel's next integrated silicon carry the pitch alone.
First-order effects
- OEMs building spring 2013 laptop lines get a full set of new 700M SKUs to pair with upcoming Haswell CPUs, letting them market 'new' graphics alongside 'new' processors.
- NVIDIA protects its discrete-GPU attach rate in mainstream and gaming notebooks at the exact moment Intel's platform transition would otherwise hand OEMs an all-Intel bill of materials.
Second-order effects
- Haswell's integrated graphics raise the bar that entry-level discrete parts must clear, pushing NVIDIA's value-tier mobile GPUs to justify themselves on performance and battery life rather than mere presence in the spec sheet.
- AMD's mobile Radeon line faces the same squeeze, competing for the shrinking pool of notebook slots where OEMs still pay for separate graphics silicon.
Third-order effects
- If every Intel CPU generation forces a matching mobile GPU rebrand, discrete graphics in thin-and-light machines gets confined to a performance niche above whatever integrated graphics delivers — a boundary that moves upmarket with each Intel node.
- The annual synchronized-refresh model entrenches NVIDIA's OEM relationships but also ties its mobile revenue cadence to Intel's roadmap, a dependency that shapes how aggressively it must differentiate each generation.
The trend: Mobile GPU vendors are locking their refresh cycles to Intel's CPU generations as improving integrated graphics steadily erodes the low end of the discrete notebook market.