As you may have guessed, the slight delay of the GeForce 9600 GT is indeed due to a last minute problem. It’s now on its way to being resolved because VR-Zone has confirmed that Nvidia has given its partners some changes to carry out on its cards so that they will function optimally. In practice, this still means seven modifications if all of Nvidia’s directives are to be followed. Now we will just have to see how many cards will actually be available for the launch on Feb. 21.

	While Intel has sold the rights to the XScale and is trying to impose x86 in MIDs (Mobile Internet Device), Nvidia slowly advances its pawns at the Mobile World Congress which is currently taking place in Barcelona by unveiling the APX 2500 destined to the Smartphone 2.0 . You may recall that the GeForce’s creator acquired the company which conceived the iPod, PortalPlayer, at the end of 2006 and thus gained some rather experienced engineers. The company will therefore offer a single chip engraved in 65nm containing an ARM 11 processor set at 750 MHz and equipped with 256 KB of L2 cache. The graphic circuit whose architecture is derived from that of the previous GeForce generation will support Direct3D Mobile and OpenGL ES 2.0. In terms of video, this chipset which was conceived for 720p decodes VC-1/WMV9, H.264 and MPEG4 formats (also encoding the last two). Furthermore, it can support HDMI 1.2 720p (in 1280 x 720), composite, S-Video output as well as LCDs and CRTs in SXGA (1280 x 1024). Finally, Nvidia announced that it can read 10 hours of HD video in 720p (...) and also has HD camcorder capabilities, something which is a bit vague. In reading the Partner quotes document related to the development of the APX 2500 platform, we can reasonably hope that it will be integrated into telephones supporting Wi-Fi and 3G.

	While thanks to ASUS we already knew that the GeForce 9500M GS are nothing more than G84s, which are already used by the GeForce 8600M GT and 8700M GT, we now learn that its GPU/memory frequencies are strictly identical to those of the 8600M GT . In the same way Nvidia’s marketing department seems to have worked hard on trying to "conceive" the GeForce 9300M G which looks surprisingly like the GeForce 8400M GS. In short, once again a purely commercial aspect is favored on the notebook market to the detriment of clarity. In the short term, the Californian manufacturer thus seems to have gotten lucky because it renews its entry level without even spending a dime (or almost). However, a lack of innovation ends up sooner or later being paid for and this probably explains why ATI’s M8x engraved in 55nm seems to be attracting large manufacturers such as Dell and HP.