NVIDIA Announces Max-Q Laptop Design Initiative At Computex 2017

At this year’s NVIDIA keynote at Computex in Taipei, the usual assortment of deep learning AI tech and Volta-powered systems were on show, but one thing was new, something called Max-Q. If you followed the events just a month prior at NVIDIA’s GTC, you’ll be up to speed on most of what’s going on with the other announcements. Max-Q is something new entirely, and the focus here for today.

As a quick recap, at GTC, NVIDIA showed off the Volta-powered V100 compute card with its impressive 120 TFLOPS of tensor compute, Jetson TX2 cards for AI assisted robots, autonomous vehicles, and cloud compute. You can read about all of those in detail in our previous article. Max-Q is something new and squarely targeted at gaming, or more specifically, gaming on mobile devices, such as laptops.

Max-Q is a design approach about maximizing performance as efficiently as possible, a philosophy inspired by aerodynamic stress optimizations pioneered by NASA for its rocket and shuttle programs. In the case of NVIDIA, it’s about developing laptops that are not only built for gaming with the highest end GPUs (GTX 1080), but fitting them into some of the thinnest laptops you’ll ever see on a high-end gaming laptop.

The headline specs are about building laptops that are 3x thinner with more than 3x the performance of the previous generation. The end result is the equivalent of a MacBook Air in appearance, but with the performance that’s 60% faster than a Playstation 4 Pro. A laptop with more power than a console, with built-in display, that’s a fraction of the size.

The achievement comes from the usual suspects, all of which are derived from efficiency. Pascal architecture on 16nm FinFET process with emphasis on running the chips at the lowest power draw possible – effectively, maturation of the manufacture process to make the chips more efficient. The next part comes from driver optimizations, squeezing every last frame out of a game’s rendering engine. The final part is thermal design and power regulation. New thermal solutions allow for much smaller designs, with ultra efficient power supplies that waste as little power as possible.

On stage was a brand new ASUS ROG Zephyrus laptop, rocking a GTX 1080, rendering a brand new game seamlessly, in a form-factor that defies belief. When you think gaming laptops, you often think 17-inch monsters that are 2-inches thick with huge exhaust ports for the air. What was on stage, was a mere shadow of the classical imposing figure

The exact implementation of the thermal design, and whether the GPUs are operating at full clock speeds will need to be studied further, since the heat from the GPU has to go somewhere. There is a good chance that the laptop body itself will be part of the thermal design, at least to some extent, simply due to proximity (18mm is not a lot of space to fit everything). Also missing were exact specs, but this is likely down to the OEMs, along with pricing information. There is a good chance though, that these laptops are not going to be cheap. We’ll keep you updated when we can get some hands-on time with one of these Max-Q designs from ASUS, MSI, Acer, or others.