
Nvidia stuffs desktop GTX 1080, 1070, 1060 into laptops, drops the “M” - antouank
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/08/nvidia-pascal-laptop-specs-gtx-1080/
======
pluma
Well, it makes sense. If you're going with a dedicated graphics card in your
laptop, battery life is already out of the window, so you might as well get as
much processing power as the thing can handle.

As a proud owner of a laptop that could double as a self-defense weapon to
cause massive blunt trauma (and a charger that falls squarely into the same
category) I welcome this decision.

I am however considering getting a lighter notebook with longer battery life
in the future. Having the power of a full desktop machine in your backpack
comes in incredibly handy when you need it but it can get a bit awkward
working with it on the train.

~~~
overcast
The issue isn't so much battery life, as it is heat dissipation. How does that
thing handle cranking out that much? Granted the new 1000 series is pretty
damn efficient at what it does(my 1070 is amazing for the price), it's still a
lot for a laptop.

~~~
cma
From the article: more CUDA cores at a lower clock. Since clock scaling isn't
linear on power consumption, doubling the cores and halving the clock (as an
example, not the actual ratio they used), leaves you with a net efficiency
gain.

~~~
jsheard
Tom's Hardware nicely demonstrated the non-linearity of power consumption in
their desktop GTX1060 review: [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-
geforce-gtx-1060-...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-
gtx-1060-pascal,4679-7.html)

At factory settings the card draws 120W and pushes ~110fps in their 1440p
test, but throttling the power limit down to just 60W only reduced it to
~90fps.

(As an aside, the AMD RX480 comparison shows why people are disappointed with
Apple supposedly using AMD Polaris GPUs in the upcoming Macbook Pro refresh)

~~~
m_mueller
I just don't understand why Apple seems to prefer AMD. Bad experience with
Nvidia's drivers in the old Core Two Duo MBPs? Does AMD have a better track
record?

~~~
kitsunesoba
Apple is a backer of and is invested in OpenCL. OS X itself leverages OpenCL
throughout the OS (Quicklook for example uses it to make previews faster) and
of course FCP/Motion/etc make heavy use of OpenCL as well.

Nvidia cards are capable of OpenCL but they've never performed as well with it
as they do with CUDA. AMD has always been the better option for that.

Of course Apple could implement CUDA support in their software, but they've
never been big on running with vendor specific standards that they had no part
in the development of.

~~~
pjmlp
You have some outdated information.

Although Apple created OpenCL and gave it to Khronos, they have the most
outdated support for OpenCL.

The future on Apple platforms is called Metal compute.

There were around 6 Metal talks at WWDC 2016 and zero about Khronos
technologies.

~~~
mixmastamyk
How does that impact the AMD vs. Nvidia part of the discussion?

~~~
pjmlp
It doesn't matter which cards are better at OpenCL, because it is a legacy
technology on Apple platforms, most likely to never be updated beyond the
current version 1.2 (latest is 2.2).

[https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202823](https://support.apple.com/en-
gb/HT202823)

Apple develops their own drivers for Metal Compute.

------
aedron
The most exciting thing to me in portable PCs is the 'VR backpack' form
factor. As cool as the HTC Vive is, moving around with a fat cable sticking
out the back of your head is a big detriment. Putting the PC in a backpack
will be so perfect for VR - bigger batteries, more efficient (without the
LCD), no cables.

These GPUs will make VR backpacks even more viable, with reduced power
consumption, better performance and reduced size. I am super excited to see
what will be coming out in this field over the coming years.

~~~
imtringued
The portable PC could double as a counter weight for the headset.

~~~
ddalex
and everybody would need neck braces just to keep the contraption moving

~~~
nkassis
how about an exo skeleton which as a bonus can provide force feedback.

------
lewisl9029
Anyone here have any experience with the new generation of TB3 External GPU
docks like the Razer Core?

$500 is pretty steep for what's essentially just a tiny case + power supply,
but if it works as advertised with no serious pitfalls, I might be tempted to
make a splurge for the extra flexibility.

Though I wish someone could make a smaller, cheaper graphics dock that's built
specifically to house less power hungry, single-slotted cards like the RX 460.
Something like that would be more than enough to handle my modest gaming needs
for the foreseeable future.

~~~
vitovito
I wrote up my initial experiences here: [http://vitor.io/razer-blade-stealth-
core-gtx-1080-12h](http://vitor.io/razer-blade-stealth-core-gtx-1080-12h)

Works pretty well, no insurmountable issues. I haven't done any 3D engine-
related dev on it yet, but am not expecting issues.

~~~
lewisl9029
Thank you for that very informative write up!

Very glad to hear the tech basically just works.

I hadn't bothered to look up the dimensions and weight on the Razer Core until
you mentioned it though, and realized it's barely any more convenient to move
around than my current desktop PC case (SilverStone FTZ01, only about 150mm
more in a single dimension), which removes a lot of the appeal it had for my
use case, unfortunately.

I honestly wouldn't mind a non-upgradable version that uses one of the laptop
cards listed in this article if it means they could make it appreciably
smaller and more discrete than a slim-SFF desktop case. I mean, the dock
itself is a modular component that can be upgraded as a whole anyways.

~~~
xchaotic
I also appreciate the review, but I think it's a case of too little, too late
and too expensive. For that price you can simply build a spare HTPC in a box
of similar size or get a powerful laptop with good GPU built-in.

~~~
lewisl9029
The problem with either of those setups is you don't get the flexibility of
being able to use the same portable, quiet and power-efficient laptop for both
work on the go and for gaming at home, so you never have to worry about
keeping things in sync between multiple machines (which is easy enough if you
just need files, but often impossible if you also want to sync arbitrary
settings for frequently used applications).

For many people like myself, the TB3 laptop + GPU dock combo is worth a lot
more than the sum of its parts.

------
WoodenChair
I think this is a sign they're worried about AMD Polaris. Most people don't
realize just how much AMD has turned around the past year. I saw an article
recently about people shorting Nvidia.

Full disclosure: I'm an AMD stock holder.

~~~
jdietrich
Polaris is not a serious threat to Nvidia. The GTX 1060 is significantly
faster than the RX480 at a similar retail price; the GTX 1060 is considerably
more expensive than the 960 was at launch and I expect that Nvidia have
retained good margins. The RX480 seriously missed AMD's efficiency targets,
hence the PCIe power fiasco. AMD have nothing to compete at the high end and
have no serious HPC offering; with PC sales shrinking year-on-year, HPC is a
crucial driver of growth.

Polaris is just barely enough to keep AMD in contention. As with their CPU
range, AMD are relegated to a value-oriented offering for the low to mid
market. This isn't a good place to be. Nvidia can afford to squeeze AMD's
margins, because they have a monopoly on the more profitable high end. AMD are
also being threatened from below by Intel's increasingly powerful iGPUs.

~~~
snovv_crash
>The GTX 1060 is significantly faster than the RX480 at a similar retail price

Not from what I saw. Slightly faster or equal in DX11, slightly slower or
equal in DX12/Vulkan.

And not price-comparable either, there is a $50 difference. If you are
pointing to the EVGA etc, note that they have a single fan and as such are
going to throttle quickly. For a good price comparison I suspect we will need
to wait for the rumoured 1050Ti, which should be _actually_ price comparable
to a 4GB RX-480.

Personally, if I was building a upper-midrange gaming PC right now, that
marginal $50 would go to a bigger SSD, not to buy a 1060 over a 480.

------
yread
Notebookcheck has a better review with link to reviews of the actual laptops
and lots of benchmarks (synthetic and games)

[http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-Pascal-for-Notebooks-
In-...](http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-Pascal-for-Notebooks-In-depth-
Benchmarks-for-the-Geforce-GTX-1080-SLI-GTX-1070-and-GTX-1060.171566.0.html)

------
xlayn
Another good reason for dropping the M is in my opinion all related to how
good another company got at creating gpus... that's Intel.

Intel first eliminated the whole aftermarket entry level gpu industry and will
probably eliminate the middle tier also.

As Pluma states

"If you're going with a dedicated graphics card in your laptop, battery life
is already out of the window, so you might as well get as much processing
power as the thing can handle"

~~~
matthewaveryusa
I'm actually really excited about external GPUs (eGPUs) that supplement your
laptop when you need it. I think this is the perfect compromise.

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2984716/laptop-
computers/how-...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2984716/laptop-
computers/how-to-transform-your-laptop-into-a-gaming-powerhouse-with-an-
external-graphics-card.html)

~~~
xlayn
Yes, I gave a read to it but if I remember I think there was a piece that
didn't perform up to the speed of the thunderbolt link making the whole
solution run 1/4 speed.

The solution approach I think goes as back as when using the express card port
on elitebooks

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDiizICogMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDiizICogMQ)

It would be incredible on the other hand to get this solutions as official
products from vendors like nvidia or asus without the DIY (not because I'm
against it but to push making use of this solutions officially will improve
the state of the solutions).

------
catpolice
"And if you can make it look like it's for grown ups too, that'd be great."

THIS. I'm not going to buy a laptop that looks like a prop from a Michael Bay
movie. The best current option for a laptop with a GPU and a design that
wouldn't be embarrassing to leave the house with is the Microsoft Surface
Book, which is expensive, has a mediocre GPU and is actually still kind of
embarrassing to own. I'm pretty excited about the day that gaming laptop
manufacturers realize that their target audience isn't entirely composed of
guys whose main fashion inspiration is Reaper from Overwatch.

~~~
devonkim
I don't see how much room for design there is on a Surface book besides the
keyboard dock assembly, but even that looks pretty spartan with clean lines
and a rather pale gray that could be mistaken for an Apple laptop from the
Aluminum Powerbook era. So I don't know what's embarrassing about it except
for, contentiously, the monochrome Microsoft logo attached to it.

~~~
serge2k
The surface book is one of the few that isn't embarassing.

Most of the gaming laptops are big plastic bricks with red LEDs everywhere .

------
NDizzle
Man. Hopefully these come with some kind car-like exhaust heat shield between
the keyboard and everything else. I tried playing games on my macbook pro, and
while it ran fine (guildwars 2, a few years ago) the machine got so blazing
hot that I had to play with an external keyboard.

After a few days of doing that I figured that having the laptop that hot for
extended periods of time wasn't a good idea and quit playing. Probably for the
better.

~~~
MollyR
I ran into this same issue. I've been quite fond of the idea of external gpus
for this exact reason.

------
pjc50
So what about that great big "?" in the table: TDP? How hot is it going to
run? How well is the laptop going to handle it - does it now require an all-
metal body? How well is the essential issue of fan and heatsink maintenance
considered in the design of the laptop?

I ask this because I have two GPU laptops both of which gradually degraded in
usability over time entirely because of thermal issues.

~~~
jon-wood
Did you try removing the heatsink/fans and cleaning them out. I was close to
replacing my laptop because it was constantly overheating and it turned out
the problem was a copper heatsink grid thing which was densely packed with
dust, insulating the entire computer. Since cleaning that out my laptop is
good as new.

~~~
pjc50
Yes, that was my first thought on experiencing the problem. It's often quite
hard to do (that's why I mentioned "How well is the essential issue of fan and
heatsink maintenance considered in the design of the laptop?" above). One of
my laptops requires taking the whole thing apart from the keyboard side in
order to get at the heatsinks below, so I gave up.

And of course there are laptops on sale which are glued shut.

Air duster works reasonably well but can force dust further into cracks.

~~~
TillE
> And of course there are laptops on sale which are glued shut.

Are there? Even Macbook Airs can be opened with nothing more than the
appropriate pentalobe screwdriver. I had to do it a while ago to clean out the
fan which had developed an annoying clicking noise.

~~~
pjc50
Microsoft Surface. I suppose you could call it a tablet, but it has a keyboard
and an i7 processor and runs Real Windows including games. The tablet/laptop
distinction is being eroded, and "tablets" are much more commonly held
together with glue.

------
moobsen
"Gears of War 4 looks amazing in 4K"

Why would you put a 1.920px × 1.080px screenshot next to that?

4K = 4096 × 2160 Pixel

~~~
Narishma
When people talk about 4K they usually mean (whether they know it or not)
UHDTV, which is the standard used in consumer monitors and TVs and in which 4K
= 3840x2160.

~~~
FlyingAvatar
I think his point was the screenshot was regular HD, not even UHDTV
resolution.

~~~
moobsen
Yes, sorry if that was not clear. Just made me question every "4K" mentioned
in the article.

------
saturdaysaint
This makes sense, as the increasing capability of tablets and phones has made
portability a lot less of a priority in a laptop for me, at least. It's almost
hard for me to imagine why a MacBook Air was an appealing buy for me in 2011 -
I think that a decent laptop was superior for a lot of general use tasks that
any recent iPhone can now do just as comfortably/quickly. When I have to use a
full system at home, I expect some sort of a major advantage in terms of
capability and I care a lot less about form factor.

I wonder if Apple even has a response in these areas where svelteness has much
less of a premium.

------
Aardwolf
I don't understand the somewhat negative tone. Small light laptops is a
market, but big ones certainly too? E.g. LAN party.

------
hatsunearu
Meh, this is bullshit.

NVIDIA laptop GPUs were always the "same chip". Each "chip" in NVIDIA can be
floorswept differently, with parts lasered off and its operating clock range
adjusted. This is why the 1080 and the 1070 is the "same chip"\--GP104.

Previous mobile chips were actually the "same chip" as the desktop ones,
except they lasered more off and reduced the clocks even more, sometimes
reduced the clocks a lot and lasered less to make the performance better by
cramming more hardware.

They just dropped the M thing to show that "oh look, we've come this far!" but
in reality, none of their policy actually changed--just floorsweep differently
to have less TDP and hopefully it's close enough to desktop tier perf.

edit: what they are, are different SKUs of the "same chip".

edit again: I'm not saying this isn't any small achievement, Pascal has
brought a ton of improvements to the design. I'm just saying it's a marketing
move that I expect the HN crowd to look through.

~~~
jdietrich
Nope. Unlike previous-generation mobile parts, these are functionally
equivalent to the desktop parts - same number of cores, shaders and ROPs, same
memory bandwidth. Of course clocks are slightly lower and these parts are
binned for higher efficiency, but the performance is very close to the desktop
parts.

The 980m was substantially cut down compared to the desktop 980 and only had
about 55% of the performance.

------
devy
Besides gaming, anyone has used this beefy laptops to run GPU intensive
machine learning algorithms? I am curious to see if it's practical to use a
gaming laptop vs. a desktop to run tensorflow calculations.

~~~
mattnewton
Personally I just built the desktop and ssh in with an old macbook. Best of
both worlds- you're using the wired connection at home to download stuff, and
your mobile device is just running a terminal and a browser so it has long
battery life, and you can turn off the laptop and let the desktop chew on your
model.

------
mrmondo
Amazing advances in GPU technologies over the past few years.

I love this comment: "...Oh, and don't forget the power adaptor, which—as I
saw with some models in performance demos—is literally the size of a brick."

~~~
douche
As long as it's not a wall-wart... Whoever seriously considers it a good idea
to block off 2-3 outlets in a powerstrip to run one DC inverter ought to be
bludgeoned with that inverter until they see reason.

~~~
GrumpyYoungMan
Absurd as it may sound, one can find extremely short 3-prong extension cords
designed specifically to take care of the wall-wart problem. Search Amazon for
"1 foot extension cord" for examples.

~~~
Vexs
You can even get shorter, down to a couple inches. They're fantastic.

------
tus
Good! We don't need portability in laptops that much anymore. We have
smartphones and tablets for that.

------
samwestdev
What about thermal throttle?

~~~
mastazi
Well you can always get a laptop with a liquid cooling dock! :-D
[https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/ROG-
GX800VH/](https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/ROG-GX800VH/)

~~~
audreyt
That setup actually works really well; its predecessor GX700 was one of the
few previous-gen laptops that can drive HTC Vive _and_ Oculus Rift (adapters
required) at the same time.
[https://plus.google.com/+AudreyTang/posts/VGebgzXnefP](https://plus.google.com/+AudreyTang/posts/VGebgzXnefP)

~~~
mastazi
> That setup actually works really well

I'm sure it does, and I wasn't suggesting otherwise! The new version (the one
I linked) has dual GTX1080 in SLI so I'm sure it's a beast, and the liquid
cooling docking station is actually very ingenious. I was just amused by how
unconventional it is, given the current tendency towards ultra-thin and/or
convertible laptops

