Speaking with some of our insider contacts at Computex got us some clues for gaming notebooks. Essentially, if you're in the market for a new gaming notebook, you might want to consider waiting a few months (think August/September). That shouldn't be too much of a surprise if you follow the gaming notebook industry, but there's more.
According to our contacts, Nvidia is readying the release of its new 10-series chips for notebooks. The kick is, they won't be M versions of desktop GPUs. They will be the same chips used on the desktops, just operating at a lower TDP—we're told there will be the same number of shader units, etc.
We're also told that Nvidia will not go back to producing separate M versions of its desktop GPUs, which is good news for those looking for better gaming performance on the road or in a desktop replacement type notebook. Traditionally, GeForce M version GPUs were cut down quite a bit compared to their desktop counterparts (e.g. 970M is 1280 cores @ ~993MHz and 970 is 1664 cores @ ~1178MHz).
Given that both the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 are now announced, it's safe to assume that the same chips will be available in notebooks around August/September. With the incredible power efficiency of the new 10-series GPUs, it makes sense for Nvidia to drop its M series GPUs entirely. GTX 1080 has an 180W TDP, uses only one 8-pin power connector, and GTX 1070 only has a 150W TDP. This is a huge drop from GTX 980 Ti's 250W TDP, and we've already seen Nvidia stuff a full GTX 980 (GM204) into notebooks.
Core clocks and voltages are obviously going to be tweaked to bring power down, if our sources are correct. Very likely we will see Nvidia do with GPUs what Intel has been doing with CPUs going back to Sandy Bridge (2nd Gen Core). They'll have a much lower base clock, but they'll be able to turbo up to relatively high clocks under the right workloads. We'll see how this all plays out in a few months. There's also the question of whether this will be for all gaming laptops/notebooks, or just for the larger devices (e.g. GTX 980 for notebooks never made it into anything smaller than 17.3 inches).
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