1 week ago
Last month, NVidia announced Optimus, a new power saving technology which promises great battery life without sacrifing performance. They still haven’t said much about it but Fudzilla has gotten word that this technology will be coming with ION 2. This is the supposed switchable graphics that we have heard about coming with ION 2.
How it works is like this: When the graphics card doesn’t need to work it’s magic like when you’re typing documents or just browsing webpages, Optimus will let Intel’s graphics chip (GMA 3150) do the work but when you play games or require graphical power, ION 2 will take over and do it’s thing.
No word on when we’ll hear next about Optimus. The next best guess is at CeBIT 2010 starting March 2nd.
Source: Fudzilla
You have to love how nvidea have to come up with fancy names for everything. Ever heard of automatically switchable graphics. I can understand the ION marketing but this is just ridiculous.
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3737
Nvidia just blew the pants off the competition. With truly seamless switching, long battery life and regular quarterly driver updates, it’s a no brainer even, get Nvidia graphics.
Yeah I’ve just been reading about that (and posted it). Added a link to Anandtech’s coverage.
Can’t wait for this tech to arrive.
Thanks for participating!
Time to rain on the parade : )
Why on earth would anyone put 2 GPU’s inside a netbook with a weak CPU it doesn’t make any sense. The only point of using the Optimus tech is that you get a good gaming GPU that doesn’t guzzle power when idle.
Directcompute/CUDA/OpenCL are pretty much a washout theres no real applications that benefit greatly & were probably a few years away from GP-GPU hitting main stream apps.
To give them credit where its due Nvidia have simplified a nice idea but its only useful to PC gamers who buy notebooks which are a relatively small customer base.
It would be cheaper to stick a Broadcom Crystal HD card inside a laptop alongside a CPU with an internal GPU which Intel/AMD have moved towards so the video playing reasons for Optimus dont hold up much either.