EPC's gallium nitride chips will enable Upi to do away with giant power supplies for gamer laptops.
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Gaming laptops will have smaller power supplies with EPC’s gallium nitride chips

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Gamers may not care about the finer points of gallium nitride (GaN) chips as evangelized by power pioneer Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC). But they will care that those chips will enable a new generation of gaming laptops with much smaller power supplies than in the past.

Today’s gaming laptops come with brick-size power supplies to provide enough power to run high-end computer games including Tomb Raider and virtual reality games such as Dead & Buried. But EPC has teamed up with Taiwanese chip manufacturer Upi Semiconductor to create GaN chips that are much faster and smaller than the current silicon power conversion chips.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.