ATI and Nvidia should stop crowbarring desktop chips into laptops

For years Nvidia has been crowbarring its desktop chips into mobile spaces and the strategy seems to find customers.

On the other hand, ATI has been slowly losing its grip by making mobile modifications to mainstream and high-end chips. It just became slow instead and lost a lot of market share to Nvidia.

The basic problem and the sum or all fears is the fact that no matter how much you fiddle with desktop chip you will still end up with a rather hot chip. Just ask Lou Burns. When you optimise a desktop chip you have to struggle to decrease the power dissipation and power consumption.

You end up with hot chips full of memory leaks that you cannot optimise enough and usually your mobile chips are much delayed after the desktop ones.

Customers - OEMs, ODMs or pllain old end users - will buy these, as the other alternative is super-slow Intel integrated chipsets. For a gamer, anything is better than Intel's integrated chippery this chipset can only play a video and a DVD and give you a picture on a desired resolution. You can forget about playing bonkers 3D games on these.

I have a confession to make. I am Fudo and I have Intel integrated in my notebook. I hate it, but my battery life doesn't so I am stuck to it for a long time.

Even the slowest Nvidia/ATI chipset and graphic for mobiles will let you play some games at some small resolution. The settings may have to be crap, but they will play. I guess that both Nvidia and ATI need to think smarter in future as the mobile market becomes really important. Especially with Vista and its power-greedy 3D Aero glass cosmetic interface just around the corner.

Notebook shipments are increasing quarter to quarter and the new sales momentum with Vista is about begin. It will probably last trough all 2007, too, as it will look great. But Vista on anotebook is a bad idea if you care about your mobility and the battery life. µ