Jeff Campbell
04-19-2010, 05:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.cultofmac.com/new-macbook-pros-amazing-battery-life-explained-by-automatic-gpu-switching/38110?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+cultofmac/bFow+(Cult+of+Mac)' target='_blank'>http://www.cultofmac.com/new-macboo...w+(Cult+of+Mac)</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"One of the major improvements of the latest MacBook Pros is in battery life: the 13-inch MacBook Pro is now boasting an impressive ten hour battery life, while even the more power hungry 15 and 17 inchers are promising eight to nine hours of mobile performance."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/at/auto/1271430020.usr105634.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>In order to get this battery life they are using something called "dynamic graphics switching" that switches between the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and the Intel HD GPUs. Apparently they have had this capability since last year but it had to be a user selected preference. Now it is all automatic. The advantage to this type of switching is that the GPUs are never run at the same time, thus saving battery life. Ars Technica also has an <a href="http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/why-the-13-macbook-pro-didnt-get-a-core-i5-upgrade.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss" target="_blank">interesting article</a> related to the inner workings of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and why it doesn't have one of the Arrandale processors.</p>