HP calls the new Compaq 8710w its most powerful mobile workstation to date, and gives much of the credit to Nvidia Corp. The latter's Quadro FX 3600M professional graphics processing unit for notebook and laptop workstations supports Nvidia's CUDA (Complete Unified Device Architecture) C-language programming interface for GPU computing, with 64 parallel processing cores to accelerate large datasets, models, and images in ISV-certified applications.

Shader Model 4.0 vertex and pixel programmability and DirectX 10 support optimize performance under 32- or 64-bit Windows Vista, while a 256-bit interface to 512MB of GDDR3 memory provides 51.2GBps of graphic memory bandwidth. Nvidia claims that the 3600M's 12-bit sub-pixel precision triples that of the nearest competitive solution, delivering high geometric accuracy and eliminating spreckles, cracks, and other rasterization anomalies.