AMD's Optimus - Power Express, supporting Intel CPUs

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,938
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/4190/hps-business-notebook-hat-trick/2

The p-series will come equipped with the new Sandy Bridge processors, but graphics support is somewhat disappointing, topping out at just the AMD Radeon HD 6470M. The 6470M has just 160 stream processors and support for GDDR5, making it feel a bit anemic for such a premium line, but AMD has apparently introduced technology comparable to NVIDIA's Optimus that enables switching between the Sandy Bridge IGP and the dedicated AMD graphics. We hope to get a look at this in the near future.

So, looks like AMD are finally catching up with NV by offering switchable graphics support, but presumably it will support both Intel and AMD processors, which will be nice going forwards (maybe Apple might start offering a choice of mobile graphics from both NV and AMD, since they make a lot of use of such systems, although I think they use their own solution and not a direct Optimus implementation on Macbooks).

AMD seems to have an ace up their sleeve with Power Express switchable graphics, a feature you can actually find on notebooks on retail shelves right now. It's perplexing as to why AMD isn't promoting this more since it puts them back on parity with NVIDIA in the mobile sector, but we'll have to get a Power Express-equipped notebook in house before we can say more.
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badb0y

Diamond Member
Feb 22, 2010
4,015
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So it's on the fly switching like Optimus? That's cool but I was quite content with manually switching on my HP Envy 14.