Laptops sporting Nvidia's 10 series Pascal graphics chips, won't be using the usual M moniker to denote reduced performance in a smaller footprint, as has been the case with previous generations. Although chips like the GTX 980M were powerful, they weren't a patch on their full desktop counterparts.
With Pascal however, there's no M, because the performance difference is much smaller than before. In fact, Nvidia promises that they will be equivalent in performance to the add-in cards. We'll need to wait and see if that plays out when reviews start coming in, but for now it seems promising.
Nvidia did do something similar to this towards the tail end of the Maxwell generation of cards, introducing a full size GTX 980 into a laptop, but it wasn't common place and the results were a mixed bag. With the much more efficient 10 series though, it may be that Nvidia really has managed to cram desktop performance into a laptop.
If so, this could be a real game changer and could usher in a new age of much more mobile gaming solutions for hardcore players.
Of course there are some differences between these chips and the desktop counterparts. The CUDA core counts are a little different (though actually higher for the GTX 1070) and clock speeds have been reduced to help keep temperatures down, but memory configurations and bandwidth are identical, so it may well be that performance remains high.
There will even be some overclocking on certain models, we're told, which means that clock dip may not matter for those willing to pay for the privilege of doing away with it.
Do you guys game on laptops at all?
