Intel finally has at least one competitor in the notebook area. Nvidia's Geforce 9400M chipset is definitely something that might provide the consumer with more choice.

Nvidia is up for a tough ride, as Centrino and Centrino 2 are ultra strong brands and this is the brand of choice for most of the clueless customers. The general conception is that Centrino is good and if the notebook doesn’t have a Centrino sticker it is not as good as the holy Centrino.

Nvidia’s Geforce 9400M GPU with system core logic, or simply called IGP chipset, has sixteen cores (Shaders), DirectX 10 support, full spec Blu-ray support, 54 GigaFlops and Advanced Display Options.

The chipset part can cope with DDR2 or DDR3 memory, up to 12 USBs, Gigabit LAN and 6 SATA ports. The Wireless LAN obviously has to come from someone else. If it's good enough for Apple it should be good enough for many others, but we will have to wait and see how the adoption goes.

We know that the market opportunity is great, as Intel-based notebooks are the majority of the market and except for not-so-popular SIS, Nvidia is now the only choice if you don’t want Intel’s chipset horror, also known as G45.