The question was about the current generation..... also you would need a native Bus to the docking station and the system would need to support hot swappable RAM....
Now or later, the question is about the "near future". (For the SP3 or SP4/SP5).
The question was about the current generation..... also you would need a native Bus to the docking station and the system would need to support hot swappable RAM....
Would it be possible for Intel to develop a CPU that optimizes battery when the device is undocked and power usage when docked?
I see no reason why not. A decade ago I had options in my laptops NVidia control panel to set a scale of battery life -> performance for the gpu when plugged in/unplugged
And it's not like cpu's don't throttle back when not being used etc.
That was the Optimus Project, driver and firmware support was abysmal and the project was abandoned, many of those devices couldn't be updated to Windows 7 without disabling the NVIDIA GPU.
Sorry, I thought you were talking about the dual GPU laptops that had an Intel GMA for when on battery and the NVIDIA GPU when on mains....That's something different. I'm talking NVIDIA ti4200 days. In the NVIDIA control panel there was a slider to adjust between performance and battery life.