NVIDIA Intoduces New Optimus Technology - Truly Seamless Switchable Graphics and ASUS UL50Vf

Back in December, NVIDIA contacted me to let me know that something "really big" was coming out in the near future. It's January 24 as I write this, and tomorrow is the "Optimus Deep Dive" event, an exclusive event with only 14 or so of the top technology websites and magazines in attendance. When Sean Pelletier from NVIDIA contacted me, he was extra excited this time and said something to the effect of, "This new technology is pretty much targeted at you, Jarred… when I saw it, I said, 'We should just call this the Jarred Edition of our mobile platform.' We can't go into details yet, but basically it's going to do all of the stuff that you've been talking about for the past couple of years." With a statement like that, you can understand that it got the gears in my head to start churning. What exactly have I been pining for in terms of mobile GPUs of late? So in advance of the actually unveiling of their latest technologies and products, I thought I'd put down what I really want to see and then we'll find out how well NVIDIA has matched my expectations.

First off, if we're talking about a mobile product, we need to consider battery life. Sure, there are some users that want the fastest notebook money can buy—battery life be damned! I'm not that type of user. The way I figure it, the technology has now existed for at least 18 months to offer a laptop that can provide good performance when you need it, but at the same time it should be able to power down unnecessary devices and provide upwards of six hours of battery life (eight would be better). Take one of the big, beefy gaming laptops with an 85Wh (or larger) battery, and if you shut down the discrete GPU and limit the CPU to moderate performance levels, you ought to be able to get a good mobile solution as well as something that can power through tasks when necessary. Why should a 9 pound notebook be limited to just 2 hours (often less) of battery life?

Finally, the last thing we'd like to see from NVIDIA is less of a gap between mobile and desktop performance. We understand that the power constraints on laptops inherently limit what you can do, and we're certainly not suggesting anyone try to put a 300W (or even 150W) GPU into a laptop. However, right now the gap between desktop and mobile products has grown incredibly wide—not so much for ATI, but certainly for NVIDIA. The current top-performing mobile solution is the GTX 280M, but despite the name this part has nothing to do with the desktop GTX 280. Where the desktop GTX 285 is now up to 240 shader cores (SPs) clocked at 1476MHz, the mobile part is essentially a tweaked version of the old 8800 GTS 512 part. We have a current maximum of 128 SPs running at 1500MHz (1463MHz for the GTX 280M), which is a bit more than half of the theoretical performance of the desktop part with the same name. The bandwidth side of things isn't any better, with around 159GB/s for the desktop and only 61GB/s for notebooks.

So, that's my wish list right now. I don't ask for much, really: give me mobile performance that has feature parity with desktop parts, with a moderate performance hit in order to keep maximum power requirements in check, and do all that with a chip that's able to switch between 0W power draw and normal power requirements in a fraction of a second as needed.