Please note that this post is tagged as a rumor.
No ‘GeForce GTX 1080M’, but ‘GTX 1080 for notebooks’?
According to the report from PCGamer, NVIDIA has no plans to release the high-end M series under GeForce brand. It basically means there won’t be any GeForce GTX 1070M and GTX 1080M graphics cards, but there will be GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 for notebooks. In other words NVIDIA will be following the same path they did with GeForce GTX 980 for notebooks, by offering desktop variants with the same clocks and configuration for high-end gaming laptops.
PCGamer:
According to our contacts, Nvidia is readying the release of its new 10-series chips for notebooks. The kick is, they won’t be M versions of desktop GPUs. They will be the same chips used on the desktops, just operating at a lower TDP—we’re told there will be the same number of shader units, etc.
This doesn’t mean there won’t be any GeForce 1000M cards. It means that only high-end segment will receive the full fledged silicons for those seeking higher performance.
MXM specifications are rather strict in TDP limits. If AMD or NVIDIA were to follow these regulations, their graphics would be limited to 100W (MXM 3.0 type B). By introducing custom boards, MXM regulations are no longer a concern. However those cards need to be adopted by notebook manufacturers, and of course that’s not cheap.
PCGamer report is lacking in details, but we can suspect that NVIDIA will only use Pascal GP104 for those non-M series. Other GPUs like GP106 were already seen in MXM 3.0 format, so I suppose those are going to continue using the M-branding.
Source: PCGamer, ComputerBase (GTX 980 picture)
