Just when we thought that NVIDIA might have just reached the zenith of power efficiency by giving notebooks the option of a GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q Design, it now looks like the company is working on a new GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti Max-Q Design GPUs for notebooks.
According to hardware site Hot Hardware, the discovery was found inside a Linux driver changelog, which supposedly lists down support for the discrete GPU in question.
As a quick recap: Notebooks with NVIDIA’s Max-Q Design GPUs are designed with one particular criteria in mind: power efficiency. Notebooks fitted with this discrete GPU aren’t made to max out its graphics performance, and technically, they take a 10 percent hit to its performance (compared to non Max-Q Design notebooks).
If this rumour does ring true though, it’s very likely that the GTX 1050 Max-Q Design is a direct response to AMD’s new Radeon RX Vega M GPU, which will be a core part of Intel’s next set of Core processors for notebooks. Known as the Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), the upcoming processor is reportedly on par with a notebook fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q Design.
At the time of writing, there are no official specifications for the GPUs, but it’s very likely that they will be placed a step below their respective non Max-Q Design brethren.
(Source: Hot Hardware)
