Details on the hardware of the NVidia Optimus

Sasha Ostojic has posted on the NVidia blog about his contributions to the NVidia Optimus, including another neat (but eerily quiet) video, and discusses the new hardware that makes it a reality.

We needed hardware support to quickly move the graphics data around in the system, so we created a fast copy engine. The Optimus Copy Engine is a new alternative to traditional DMA (Direct Memory Access) transfers between the GPU frame buffer memory and system memory used by the IGP. With Optimus we also removed multiplexers, called MUXs, so we use the integrated graphics as a display adapter or pass through. The discrete GPU can do the heavy lifting and pass through the results to the integrated graphics chip to be displayed.

Be sure to read our coverage of the NVidia Optimus as well, including a promo video from NVidia showing a great side-by-side comparison of existing switchable graphics and the new Optimus.

via nTersect Blog – World, Meet Optimus.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .