Laptop Thoughts: Notebooks Getting A Fermi Push

"“The GeForce 400M Series takes the award-winning Fermi architecture across a complete line-up of DirectX 11 GPUs for notebook,” said Nvidia’s general manager for notebook GPUs Rene Haas, in a statement. “Coupled with Optimus technology, 400M Series notebook GPUs deliver great performance for visual computing applications when you need it, and great battery life when you don’t.”"

While the integrated graphics market is moving forward with Sandy Bridge, Nvidia is not standing still. Mobile GPUs have always been a few months behind their desktop counterparts, but they still offer considerable processing power, both for 3D acceleration and other parallel tasks like video decoding. Hopefully, the GeForce 400M line will keep the discrete mobile graphics market going and provide as much of a boost as what Fermi did for the desktop industry. Those of you who like to game on your notebooks may want to hold off a few months to see what the new GPUs are like.