nVidia switchable graphics

Seems like improved from the current T400 with fully automated (profile based) switching over the PCIe bus. The 5s flicker with hardware based solutions has been changed to a software one with no flicker. Lenovo has been mentioned demonstrating working systems.

Hopefully ATI will catch up and make it workable with the older T400 too.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/optimus_technology.html
http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/02/world-meet-optimus.html
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wi...-brings-new-level-of-switchable-graphics.aspx

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3737
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/18443

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5529

There is also the part of fusion coming ahead for AMD, so this might or not might be that important in future.

Images sourced from TechReport.

 

There is also the good part of hardware switch, especially for other platforms such as Linux that doesn't know how to talk to the hardware, so I think that the mixture of the hardware part is still good (ie BIOS switchable). If it is purely software I would imagine even more issues with other OSes.

 

Although Windows related, here is a post from the Windows experience blog that also explains this feature:

NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology Brings New Level of Switchable Graphics

In my opinion that few second flicker is not that bad that I couldn't live with it (I use switching in my T500). Of course they are advertising Optimus as something very different and new, but lets face it, its just a small improvement over the solution that Lenovo had in the previous generation of ThinkPads.

The switching methods that do get mentioned in the article I linked might be a little troublesome (pushing buttons, rebooting, logoff/logon).

This is not to say I would not mind a seamless transition in the T500. I just think it might not be possible to implement it afterwards - we will see.

Also, I am a bit sceptical about that automatic switching and how it works. Would need first hand experience to be able to give an accurate opinion on that one.

 

I'm sure the automatic switching will be somewhat buggy in the beginning, regardless of OS. It is definitely important that there is a way to override this that isn't software dependent.

I personally don't care that much about automatic switching and in most cases would want it to be manual anyways. And, as JaLooNz mentioned, it is important to Linux users that a manual hardware / bios option be available.

 

Although I do not know anything about integrated circuit design (or barely anything) I wonder if it would be easy to create a dedicate graphics chip/GPU, that could shut down parts of itself - essentially cutting down power consumption and heat generation. That way you could run it either in Full Power ("dedicated") or Battery Saving ("integrated") mode.

CPUs do this also (or at least something similar): they change their frequency/speed, which also cuts down heat production and power consumption. With a GPU you might want to shut down (put to sleep) parts completely, that are not utilitized by simple UI (word processing, web, etc), and only have them operational when graphic intensive tasks are being performed.

So I ask, why can't GPUs support that? For me, it would have sounded like a simpler solution than having 2 separate graphics cores and trying to make them work in a switchable way.