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Nvidia has lifted the lid on its new range of mobile GPUs based on the Pascal architecture - and the results are quite extraordinary. Gone are the days of laptop-specific graphics processors with reduced specs compared to their desktop counterparts. There is no GTX 1080M, only GTX 1080, with the same core specification as the desktop part: the same CUDA core count, the same boost clock. And it's the same for GTX 1060, too. Meanwhile, the mobile GTX 1070 does see some variation, trading boost clock speed for additional CUDA cores vs its desktop counterpart. Nvidia reckons that its mobile processors are - at most - 10 per cent slower than then desktop equivalents, and that comes down to variations in the thermal solutions found in laptops, which will impact the kind of boost clocks you're likely to get in actual gaming scenarios. But even given what we would consider a constricted thermal envelope, the new Pascal-based mobile GPUs offer a huge leap in performance compared to their predecessors. There's even much-improved overclocking too - Nvidia demonstrated a 2.06GHz GTX 1080 overclock on an MSI notebook. Results will vary per implementation, but it's impressive nonetheless.
And there's another welcome innovation here: there's no downgrade to memory bandwidth as we saw with the likes of the old GTX 980M and its less capable siblings. GTX 1080 on laptops still ships with the same 10gbps GDDR5X memory, while GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 are still using top-of-the-line 8gbps GDDR5. So comparing specs, Nvidia's old GTX 980M flagship had just 160GB/s of memory bandwidth - GTX 1080 has double that: 320GB/s.
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