With Vista and DX10 now just around the corner, notebooks need hardware that's up to the task. Right now, a green scene is being painted.
It's not the sexiest part of the market to talk about and it's not the sort of place you'll find any FPS records being broken, but the mobile market is still key to GPU manufacturers. As long as Intel pumps out integrated solutions with dire 3D performance, there's ample room for far nippier discrete solutions.
Vista's looming and so is DX10, so for notebook manufacturers, right now it's about making laptops that can display a badge along the lines of "I can do all that, with bells on!".
It's here that NVIDIA has an advantage over AMD's ATI mobile products. MXM modules make for easy SKU switches. We'll also see NVIDIA's GeForce 8200 and 8600 SKUs make an appearance first, so NVIDIA will get mobile variants into notebooks before ATI.
The bottom line is, come CeBIT, there'll be a sea of green laptops... the big boys all want DX10 support and they know where they can get it from.
There are rumours about a multi-GPU ATI configuration for notebooks. Up to 8 GPUs, so we've heared. However, right now it just seems to be something for journos to get excited about and little else.
