By It’s cool when new technologies from two different companies, work perfectly together. In fact, when it happens the engineer inside of me sort of, well, geeks out.
The first technology, NVIDIA Optimus, automatically optimizes your notebook for great performance and great battery life. You can read more about it here: www.nvidia.com/optimus
The second technology comes from Intel. As you may know, Intel launched their WiDi technology at CES this year – WiDi displays your laptop screen on your TV wirelessly through an adapter connected to your TV so you can share movies and photos on the big screen.
An Intel WiDi notebook includes a Core i Family CPU with Intel Integrated Graphics, an Intel WiDi Adapter, and Intel WiDi software. You can read more about it here: www.intel.com/go/wirelessdisplay
The way Optimus works with Intel WiDi is pretty impressive–meaning there is no additional hardware or software changes required. A notebook manufacturer simply needs to build a notebook that meets the Intel WiDi design requirements, and the NVIDIA Optimus design requirements, and it just works.
Other engineers reading this will know that getting two new technologies to work together usually requires patches or hardware changes. But the unique architecture of Optimus enables it to work perfectly with Intel WiDi. Actually, NVIDIA Optimus technology is the only discrete GPU solution that does work with Intel WiDi.
You can see the diagrams below. The wireless display attaches to Intel integrated graphics, just like any other display out – whether it’s the internal notebook panel or an external VGA port. Optimus can render pixels for any display attached to the Intel integrated graphics. And, in the case shown below, those pixels are going to both the notebook display and the wireless display.
This diagram shows you what the Optimus+Intel WiDi topology looks like when a standard office application or basic web browsing happens. The NVIDIA GPU turns electrically off, and the Intel CPU and IGP are rendering and doing the work
This Diagram show you the data flow when a more intense application is used, like watching an HD movie from Youtube. The NVIDIA GPU powers on and does the work and passes the final data to the IGP, which displays it to the notebook panel and the wireless display.
It’s important to note that Optimus doesn’t magically resolve issues with protected content or latency to the wireless display. But the intended use case of wirelessly sharing movies and photos works perfectly.
Check out the demo below:
