Dec 7, 2010 11:00 GMT  ·  By

Lately, more and more notebook computers have started to move away from integrated graphics and levitated towards discrete GPUs offered by either AMD or Nvidia, the latest of these two companies apparently winning the 2011 race, reports suggesting that more than 200 notebook designs will future Nvidia graphics, including some Sandy Bridge machines.

According to the TechEye publication, Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang is extremely confident that 2011 will bring the company its highest notebook market share yet .

Slated to be released on January 5 2011, Sandy Bridge processors are based on Intel's upcoming architecture that should offer important performance improvements over the current Arrandale chips that are used in most notebooks available today.

Compared to these present day processors, Sandy Bridge will offer improved graphics, early previews suggesting the chips are able to compete with some entry-level discrete graphics cards.

For this reason, the decision to go with Nvidia graphics for such a wide number of notebooks designs strikes me a bit odd especially considering the future 500 series mobile graphics cards to be unveiled at CES will be most likely just a rebrand of the company's present day solutions.

As a result some of these discrete graphics cards could just as well be outpassed by the Intel HD integrated graphics that are available inside the Sandy Bridge architecture.

On the other side, high performance and gaming notebooks would surely benefit from the extra performance provided by the Nvidia solutions, so the report could as well refer to those type of laptop models.

Whatever it may end up being the case I am sure that all these suppositions will be put to rest during CES 2011 as notebook manufacturers will surely try to best each other by releasing as many Sandy Bridge models as possible right after Intel releases its new CPUs.