‘Macbook Pro has hardware for Hybrid Power and Hybrid Sli’
The Geforce 9400M chipset in the new Macbook Pro offers support for Hybrid Power, Hybrid Sli and 8GB RAM. Nvidia has confirmed this to Gizmodo.
According to Nvidia, the MacBook Pro can use both Hybrid Power, which can turn off the GPU to save energy, and Hybrid Sli, which allows the IGP and GPU to work together to improve performance. In addition, according to the GPU maker, the new chipset supports up to 8GB of RAM. At the announcement of the new Macbook Pro and the Nvidia Geforce 9400M chipset, there was still a lot doubt whether the chipset would support these features, but the confirmation from Nvidia puts an end to this uncertainty.
However, the new Macbook Pro cannot yet use the aforementioned functionality: Apple has to adapt its operating system for this. It is not yet known if and when Apple will do this. Furthermore, Mac OS X does not yet support the hardware decoding of h.264 video material by the Nvidia chips. Here too, the Macbook Pro does have the necessary hardware on board, but it is still unclear is when Apple will make the functionality available.