Is NVIDIA’s Optimus tech the GPU future of the MacBook line?

Intel’s decision to marry their new mobile Core i5 and i7 CPUs with integrated graphics has reportedly not gone over well with Apple, who are rumored to be demanding custom-designed chips from Intel for an update to their MacBook and MacBook Pro line of notebooks.

But perhaps there’s another solution. Gizmodo noticed that NVIDIA, maker of the MacBook line’s ubiquitous GeForce 9400M GPU, is now teasing a new notebook technology called Optimus that is supposedly capable of achieving the performance of discrete graphics in a notebook while still delivering great battery life.

It’s probably just scalable performance, but if the Optimus tech is as good as NVIDIA is bragging, it would allow Apple to ditch the substandard switchable GPU configuration of current unibody MacBook Pros, which requires a reboot, to a discrete-only solution, like the earliest MacBook Pros and PowerBooks.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Hardware, Macbook, MacBook Pro, News |

http://trimtab.ca Alex
Actually, the switch between discrete and integrated graphics in the current MBPs does not require a reboot; just a log-out of all users. With the speed of Snow Leopard, this only costs the user a minute at best and is really not the very negative anti-feature this article paints it as. :)
Joseph
@Alex: Speak for yourself. My Mac can be up for weeks at a time, and logging out to switch graphics chips is clunky at best, and productivity-killing at worst. Poor design on Apple’s part.