COMDEX: NVIDIA's NV17M Mobile GPU

While personally I think that attempts to turn laptops into workstations in a folly, kitting the things out so that they can last through a transcontinental flight on a single battery is a good thing for you if you want to choose your own movies or play games instead of eating peanuts and swigging down cocktails. It's also, unfortunately, a good thing for your boss, who will expect you to work in transit instead of the aforementioned eating, drinking, and goofing off. Over at Comdex, where Omid and Dave are scouring the show floor between losing their shirts at the gaming tables, NVIDIA announced yet another battery-saving chip (sorry, I mean mobile GPU) that is attempt to keep you gaming or working from New York to Paris. The new mobile GPU is code-named the NV17M and includes NVIDIA's PowerMizer Technology, integrated Video Processing Engine (VPE), and antialiasing. Antialiasing seems to be the "gee-whiz" feature of the new chip and, along with reduced power consumption, it's supposed to clean up your display and give you high frame rates despite the XGA resolution (1024 x 768) of notebook LCDs. It's also smaller than your typical laptop GPU, squeezing an AGP graphics subsystem - including the GPU core and frame buffer up to 64MB - into a space previously held by the GPU alone. The chip's PowerMizer technology is said to provide power only to the portions of the chip being used, and dedicated hardware, including an integrated MPEG2 decoder and 3D graphics engine, reduces CPU use for DVD playback and 3D applications to extend battery life. NVIDIA's new mobile GPUs will be found in carry-on computers in early 2002.