This whole thing is a really good point. Most of the time our computers are not needing any graphics capability. Ha ha ha ha... har har har har (cough, cough), I just realized I'm driving my three monitors with 1) GeForce 3, AGP 4x, 64 Meg, 2) Matrox Millennium G450 DualHead PCI, 16 MB. Oh, and a 1 Ghz Athlon.
Surprising, huh? All of the processor and graphics capability we are reading about here is just for playing games. When you browse here you don't need much in the way of processor or graphics...

Power to the Monitors, Man! I leave my computer on, but turn the monitors off when I go.

Perhaps a Game computer should be a "side box" that you turn on when you feel like wasting time, I mean, you feel like playing a game...

Don't hold your breath for linux support...

"The status of AMD's Hybrid Graphics Technology under Linux isn't officially known, but as there is no standard CrossFire support from their binary Linux driver, don't expect any Hybrid action anytime soon."

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=975&num=1

So are we looking at 100w+ of power savings on idle now?

I wonder if anyone has tried running physics calcs on an IGP. I suspect the overhead makes it no better than just leaving it on the CPU, but it would be a cute use for those shaders if they're now available.

I really like this idea. My SLI rig (2x 6800gs) is doing nothing most of the time. Even if I had one video card, like an 8800 Ultra, it would be nice to know that it was off when I was surfing.

I need a bit of clarification on CrossFire X. Is this supposed to allow teaming of video cards of the same family (IE: two HD 38xx's) or will it allow a more broad choice, such as throwing in my old X1900XT to augment my HD 3870?