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MacBook Pro Does Not Support Both GPUs Simultaneously

Like it was already posted before, I think offering the possibility of switching to the 9400 was just included as a nice "extra".

"What about the GPU in the chipset - it looks like such a waste never to use it."

"OK, it would be cool to offer on-the-fly switching between the 9400 and 9600. That'll give a nice performance/battery life tradeoff."

"That's not so easy, because we'd have to move all the graphics context from VRAM to shared RAM, somehow pauze Quartz and update all the pointers... tricky! I don't think we'll be able to pull this off in time for the release."

"Well as a shortcut, we could simply require a log-out. All Quartz stuff would be stopped then anyway, and we'd only need to do a few tricks with the login app."

"Good idea. We'll work on this on-the-fly switching later. I'm sure our faithful users at MacRumors will appreciate the crude switch mode in the mean time - it's better than nothing right?"
 
pgifford said:
Maybe Apple is waiting to release the 17" MBP to see what people complain about the most in the newly released 15" MBP.

In that case, the 17" MBP will have a matte screen with simultaneous GPU support and a silver keyboard.
Click to expand...

I'd say the holdup for the 17" MBP is the cost of an LED-backlit screen. And maybe the torsional requirements of such a wide and tall pane of glass? I'm no engineer but wouldn't a piece of glass of that area crack easily?
 
imm22 said:
Hello,

Regarding the Hybrid SLi limitation of the new MacBook Pro, that's an Hardware or a software limitation?

In case of software,is nvidia planning the release of a bootcamp Driver for windows Vista 32/64 bits?

And on last question.
Is the Chipset and Mobo, limited to 32Bits, then limiting the amount of RAM? Will 64bits OS take full advantage of this new Nvidia 9400 (Graphics / Chipset) ?
Click to expand...

Well as far as I know OS X is about the most 64 Bit Mainstream system OS. Since the only thing 64 Bits does for you right now is give you more addressable memory its not a big deal. When Snow Leopard Comes out thats when thing get interesting. Since that will support more 64 bit functions and addresses multi-GPUs as well. Also you can run 64 bit windows if you want I just don't see the need
 
ipsmo said:
SLI is new technology yet your surprised the MacBook Pro doesn't support it because of the fact that it has two graphics cards.
Click to expand...

Just a slight note. SLI has been around since PCIe took off. Technically that is just a rebirth of 3dfx SLI (seen in the Voodoo 2 in 1998). So it really isn't all that new. Hybrid SLI has always been the next logical step it was just never really exploited till now. Notice that something like Hybrid SLI takes place when you have two different speed GPU's in SLI mode, the faster GPU slows down to the speed of the slower GPU.
 
Sander said:
Like it was already posted before, I think offering the possibility of switching to the 9400 was just included as a nice "extra".

"What about the GPU in the chipset - it looks like such a waste never to use it."

"OK, it would be cool to offer on-the-fly switching between the 9400 and 9600. That'll give a nice performance/battery life tradeoff."

"That's not so easy, because we'd have to move all the graphics context from VRAM to shared RAM, somehow pauze Quartz and update all the pointers... tricky! I don't think we'll be able to pull this off in time for the release."

"Well as a shortcut, we could simply require a log-out. All Quartz stuff would be stopped then anyway, and we'd only need to do a few tricks with the login app."

"Good idea. We'll work on this on-the-fly switching later. I'm sure our faithful users at MacRumors will appreciate the crude switch mode in the mean time - it's better than nothing right?"
Click to expand...

Thats how it when down I was there really :rolleyes:
 
slackpacker said:
Well as far as I know OS X is about the most 64 Bit Mainstream system OS. Since the only thing 64 Bits does for you right now is give you more addressable memory its not a big deal. When Snow Leopard Comes out thats when thing get interesting. Since that will support more 64 bit functions and addresses multi-GPUs as well. Also you can run 64 bit windows if you want I just don't see the need
Click to expand...

I could say MAC OSx instead of windows vista 64, My question is; is this new machine capable of working on a pure 64bits without limitations?
 
The only issue I have with this concept is the fact that it artificially inflates the price of the MBP. How much less would that notebook be without the extra GPU? One would have been enough even with an hour less battery life. A redundant feature that is being passed onto consumers.
 
Spankey said:
The only issue I have with this concept is the fact that it artificially inflates the price of the MBP. How much less would that notebook be without the extra GPU? One would have been enough even with an hour less battery life. A redundant feature that is being passed onto consumers.
Click to expand...

The 9400 is apart of the NB. So it doesn't cost anything extra to hook it up to the video stream.
9300block.jpg

Note that the diagram shows the 9300 the same still applies to the 9400.
Link to image, just in case the linking fails.
 
Bubba Satori said:
Yes, GPUs have done that for several years now.
Click to expand...

And all the clueless readers noting it have been complaining about it bitterly when they noticed their GPUs were not running at full speed. (And when you stare at a dialog showing the GPU clock speed your GPU is most likely not doing very much, so it is being clocked down, so that dialog shows a low clock speed).
 
Spankey said:
The only issue I have with this concept is the fact that it artificially inflates the price of the MBP. How much less would that notebook be without the extra GPU? One would have been enough even with an hour less battery life. A redundant feature that is being passed onto consumers.
Click to expand...

The graphics card is part of the chipset. So to remove it, Apple would have to use a different chipset on the MacBook Pro than on the MacBook, which adds development cost, testing cost, more cost to build, less rebate from NVidia and so on. As a hardware maker, you want as few differences between your different models as possible.

And I can tell you that very few people would want to give up an extra hour of battery life.
 
Spankey said:
The only issue I have with this concept is the fact that it artificially inflates the price of the MBP. How much less would that notebook be without the extra GPU? One would have been enough even with an hour less battery life. A redundant feature that is being passed onto consumers.
Click to expand...

The chipset was designed like this By Nvidia in its current form its a good option. Basically you get a better Graphics card in the MPB. Simple and not redundant.
 
DoFoT9 said:
that diagram looks a lot more confusing than apples did!

that is quite impressive.
Click to expand...

What is crazy is although the NB/MGPU can do all of that stuff, Apple isn't choosing to use a lot of it. What would be nice to see is what USB, SATA, and Audio system Apple has decided to use.
 
diamond.g said:
What is crazy is although the NB/MGPU can do all of that stuff, Apple isn't choosing to use a lot of it. What would be nice to see is what USB, SATA, and Audio system Apple has decided to use.
Click to expand...

im guessing that they have used them, but they have simplified the diagram immensely, somewhat like a context diagram :cool: (maybe??)
 
Hi
slackpacker said:
32 bit Vista shows 4GB. The Bios is different now in the MBP late 2008
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I'd advise you to look into that a bit further. My problem is actually opposite. My 3GB of 4GB installed is a hardware limitation of the older Intel 945GM chipset. My Vista shows 4GB installed, however, Task Manager shows the real amount usable ( Total = 3039 ) under Physical Memory ( MB ).
 

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MacCheetah3 said:
Hi

I'd advise you to look into that a bit further. My problem is actually opposite. My 3GB of 4GB installed is a hardware limitation of the older Intel 945GM chipset. My Vista shows 4GB installed, however, Task Manager shows the real amount usable ( Total = 3039 ) under Physical Memory ( MB ).
Click to expand...

For what I know Vista 32 and XP 32, can only see a maximum of 3Gb of RAM, precisely due to its 32 bits limitation. And even on the 64 bits version, you have to activate the "memory mapping" feature on the BIOS.

I'm interested to know this because I've read somewhere that there are some questions about the hardware capability for running 64 bits applications . they didn't know for sure if the hardware was 32 or 64 bits design, I think it was on a post related with iFixit...
 
Hi
slackpacker said:
Yup your right Sorry about that. 3Gb Drat
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No problem with me. ::cool: I was just being helpful. The only two reasons I got the x64 version of Vista are 1) future proofing and 2) considering the terrible to non-existent developer support of x64 XP, I wanted to see if that was true with Vista.
 
FunkyMrC said:
I really could not care less and think it's great to be able to switch. There's no need to use both.
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For me is imperative to use Windows 64 vista version. All my program run on windows. 3D Mechanical parametric and associative software, Like Solidworks and Catia.
 
I dont care if the 2 card are not used at the same time (...yeah okay if games were getting better fps it would be nice), But I would really appreciate the 9400 to help computation !
Anyway I am impatient to see some benchmark under OSX, XP, Vista
With game and soft ^_^
also: Need OSX 10.6
 
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