Nvidia Max-Q launches Pascal into thinner, lighter notebooks
Gaming laptops have gotten thinner and lighter in recent years, but they still tend to be thick, heavy bruisers that aren't any fun to carry between power plugs. Nvidia wants to change all that with a program called Max-Q, its in-house initiative to help gaming laptop makers build machines it describes as "3x thinner" and with "3.3X more performance" than the typically truckish GTX 880M-equipped gaming laptop of a couple years past. There are several fancy Max-Q notebooks debuting at Computex this week, but they all seem to share several basic characteristics: a chassis under 0.8" (20 mm) thick, a weight of around five pounds, and a GTX 1080 pushing pixels.
One can't just shove the full 110W of the mobile GTX 1080 inside a relatively thin-and-light chassis, of course. Similar restrictions apply for the mobile GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 in their Max-Q trims. Nvidia says part of Max-Q is "operating the GPU for peak efficiency," which ...