New MacBook GPU Made Available To All

[danrok]

See front page:
AOA - New MacBook GPU Made Available To All

Comments?

[fantomfreq]

The one thing that I thought looked cool with the new Macbook Pros is the fact that they have both an integrated graphics chip AND a discrete one. According to Apple (so take this with a grain of salt), the integrated chip boosts battery life while of course the discrete one boasts better performance. I believe I remember hearing about this a while ago (maybe with AMD... something about them integrating them into the main CPUs themselves) but this is the first time I personally have seen one make it to the consumers. They don't say too much how it works, but I'd imagine that when you select power saver mode it uses the integrated chip and when you go full power it uses the other one.

Have there been any PCs using this kind of technology put out to date? Makes me think... that would be a cool idea with main processors as well. You could use some low-power processor like an atom to save power but switch on a faster one for processor-intensive tasks.

[Aedan]

On the GPU bit - Sony released a machine in March 2006 (I think?) which featured the following:

Originally Posted by Sony Vaio SZ

There's also a revolutionary hybrid graphics system that features on-the-fly switching between the power-saving graphics chip or the dedicated NVIDIA® GeForce® 9300M GS chip for more robust performance.

Another question - does a faster processor (IE, SU9400) take more power when it's throttled down to the same speeds as Atom?