When would Intel/AMD "Optimus" come to higher end laptops?

[Vertrucio]

I really like the Sager 8690, and can deal with the short battery life, but I really like the idea of the laptop switching between a lower and higher end GPUs as needed to conserve battery life. After all, any extra mobility on the go is a plus. I'd love to have one single laptop I can use for both general purpose work (web, email, text processing, etc) and high end gaming/work (photoshop, Maya, etc) without worrying about where to plug in. The sweet spot would of course be about 3-4 hours without plugging in for low level activity.

I think it was something like intel's new Sandy Bridge platform would bring optimus to these higher end PCs. This releases around January 5th according to reports.

AMD has a similar CPU+GPU platform coming out that could also have its own form of Optimus, although I haven't read anything saying it would do this.

Has anyone else heard anything along these lines?

 

[Fourstaff]

I really like the Sager 8690, and can deal with the short battery life, but I really like the idea of the laptop switching between a lower and higher end GPUs as needed to conserve battery life. After all, any extra mobility on the go is a plus. I'd love to have one single laptop I can use for both general purpose work (web, email, text processing, etc) and high end gaming/work (photoshop, Maya, etc) without worrying about where to plug in. The sweet spot would of course be about 3-4 hours without plugging in for low level activity.

I think it was something like intel's new Sandy Bridge platform would bring optimus to these higher end PCs. This releases around January 5th according to reports.

AMD has a similar CPU+GPU platform coming out that could also have its own form of Optimus, although I haven't read anything saying it would do this.

Has anyone else heard anything along these lines?

Optimus? Its a Nvidia technology, and sure, my piece of shit laptop can do that too, switching between the onboard HD4200 to something which is barely twice as good (the 4570). Battery life lasts only about 20% better though, but that's just an estimate from me. 3-4 hours for a well spec'ed laptop is very hard to find unless you have spare batteries.

Edit: Welcome to TPU, best place in the internets.

 

[Vertrucio]

Thanks for the response, and for the welcome. It's been a while since I was interested in hardware but it's calling me back. Last time I did a real going over of the state of the industry was about 3 years ago, and that's decades by hardware timescales. So I think I'll stick around, this looks like a nice community.

 

[Fourstaff]

this looks like a nice community.

You will be kicked out if you think its not a nice community

There are arguments here and there every so often, so you will have to stick up to those. And you don't need follow the hardware all the time, a peek here and there for about 1/2-1 hour a week is more than enough to keep you up to date. I recommend you look at TPU's frontpage every so often, and another website like anandtech just to that you catch all the news (our in house news editor Btarunr sometimes misses an article here and there, but mostly he is beyond excellent, even compiling all the reviews from other website)