A few years ago, upgrading the graphics hardware in your laptop seemed virtually unthinkable. Today, VoodooPC, Alienware, and even Dell all offer exactly that. While this feature is interesting to a fairly small niche market of mobile gamers, a standardized pin-out and form factor could help the whole laptop PC graphics market evolve much faster.
Up until now Intel, the progenitor of PCI Express, has not specifically defined a slot, pin-out, or form factor for mobile GPUs that will use PCI Express. Given the growing importance of GPU performance in the mobile segment, this seems an odd omission, though Intel's focus in the mobile space has always been on integrated graphics. But nVidia has stepped into the breech and delivered a specification the company is calling MXM.
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