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Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Mobile sighting hints at more powerful gaming laptops

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Soon, you’ll be able to take advantage of ray tracing and the powerful capabilities of Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 2080 graphics processor on a slim laptop. After announcing the new desktop-class Turing graphics architecture, it appears that Nvidia is working on bringing its avdancements in the graphics card space to notebooks. A listing for the GeForce 2080 Mobile GPU was spotted recently, suggesting that a launch may be coming in the near future.

The mobile Turing-based GPU was listed as Turing TU104M on Device Hunt, and it’s believed that the “M” in that product listing stands for mobile. The listing described the processor as “GeForce RTX 2080 Mobile” with a device ID of 1eab.

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For gamers who demand power in a portable package, there are reports that the RTX 2080 Mobile chipset will be available with Nvidia’s Max-Q design. Similar to the Max-Q designs for current GTX series mobile chips, this should result in slim and powerful mobile gaming notebooks. YNvidia may have been able to use improvements in the GPU’s architecture to overcome heat constraints. “TDP [thermal design power] is usually the next big concern, but considering 12 NFF is an improved version of 16nm FinFET, this is something that we should have quite a bit of leeway with (low clocks + 12 NFF = decent TDP),” Wccftech reported.

One manufacturer of gaming systems told that publication that it was able to put the RTX 2080 Max-Q chipset inside current 15- and 17-inch systems with Nvidia’s help. Given that the RTX 1080 Max-Q works on systems designed for the older GTX chips, this hopefully means we won’t see any significant increase in weight or thickness on mobile gaming laptops.

At this point, Nvidia may likely be holding off its announcement of the RTX 2080 Mobile processor until it has depleted inventory of existing GTX 10xx Mobile series processors.

Like the current GTX 10xx series, Nvidia is also speculated to be working on more mobile processors in the RTX series to target different price points and levels of performances, including mobile editions of the RTX 2080 and RTX 2060 GPUs. It’s unclear when those chips may debut, but given that the desktop version of the RTX 2070 won’t be available until November, theRTX 2070 likely won’t debut before then. And Nvidia will likely not ship its RTX 2060 Mobile until it has shipped both the RTX 2080 Mobile and RTX 2070 Mobile. Are you excited for Nvidia’s RTX series processors to hit mobile systems? Or will you be taking advantage of the likely price drops that will happen on GTX-equipped systems once new laptops debut with RTX graphics?

Chuong Nguyen
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
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