NVidia NV17M Mobile GPU Preview
Mathew Solnik writes: "A year ago nVidia set the laptop world on fire with the release of the GeForce2 Go mobile graphics chipset. Today they push the envelope with the release of the NV17M mobile graphics chipset. Offering unmatched performance in 3D gaming applications, the NV17M promises to put nVidia at the forefront of high end graphics solutions for mobile systems. This GPU is much faster then the Geforce2 Go and is more or less the Geforce3 for laptops. Check out AMDZone for the preview." Pretty incredible how powerful laptops are, even given their lag behind desktop performance. This is far more powerful than any video card I've ever owned.
Not so much for gaming but in my last job I talked to many people who wanted "awesome gfx" on their laptops to do presentations using high end (http://www.ptc.com) cad/cam packages. It was just easier in many cases for them to do the presentation on a laptop. That is one of the business reasons for this.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
The review/preview makes a big deal about how most laptop DVD players drain the batteries before the movie is entirely over, or very shortly after. Using a dedicated graphics chip to render the animation should improve the battery life by quite a bit.