Interesting Confirmation on the Dual-GPU MacBook Pros
I was talking to a friend today about the new 17-inch MacBook Pro and it's dual-GPU configuration, and why I thought that was Apple's design for more cores as opposed to putting a quad-core CPU into the laptop. He didn't think the two could be powered at the same time, and pointed to the need for a reboot in the current hardware to switch from one to the other. I didn't remember where I'd read the news from NVidia, but I found it today.
The article points out that the NVidia representative confirmed:
Besides confirming that you'll see it in other notebooks soon, they definitively answered some lingering questions about the chip's capabilities: It can support up to 8GB of RAM. It can do on-the-fly GPU switching. And it can work together with the MacBook Pro's discrete 9600M GT. But it doesn't do any of those things. Yet.
This makes perfect sense then.
Apple invests in OpenCL and gets some of the ObjC code in the OS to use it and then all of a sudden it's got a tremendous advantage over those machines that don't have the similar capability. I was a little surprised to see the dual-GPU in the 15-inch MacBook Pro, but wrote it off to the fact that the integrated GPU was "free", and removing it was more expensive than just using it. But it wasn't good enough, so they added the "good" one.
Not so, I think now.
This is going to be a CPU/GPU machine where the integrated GPU is connected directly to the system RAM, and that makes perfect sense for fast processing. Sure, it's going to require a lot of work to get OpenCL integrated into the OS, or core Frameworks, but when it does what a boost!
Yup, I've got to order one of these boxes. Gotta.