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Meaning that they are what, 20 % faster in real-world benchmarks?

I'll walk past the oxymoron and pretend it isn't there, just to refute the actual question:

No. The part that costs $1000 more than AMD's $200 parts is not 20% faster. More like 300% faster. It's 50-100% faster than AMD's fastest part.

Here's a graph from about 7 months ago (note those are system prices, not CPU prices): http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/18502

Part numbers and prices will have changed by now, but the basic structure of that graph doesn't change much over time. Two years ago Intel was actually ruling performance/price in the midrange, but AMD started slashing prices because it was getting completely killed in unit sales. AMD now strategizes pricing to remain a few dollars to the left of Intel at every price point it enters, because if it doesn't it will go out of business within a few months.

But AMD chips cost more to make than Intel chips, and AMD has to share that money with its fab partners: GlobalFoundries, TSMC, UMC, and Chartered. AMD no longer fabs chips (GlobalFoundries is its fab spinoff), which puts it at a serious production-efficiency disadvantage. You can attribute some of the slip in Fusion to this.

I had a PowerBook G4, then a MacBook, their first to have the chiclet keyboard, then an early aluminium MacBook Pro. The chiclet keyboard is the most comfortable keyboard I've used, and a day didn't go by when I was on the MBP that I didn't want the chiclet keyboard back. (I have since gotten a MacBook Pro with the chiclet keyboard, and I'm very happy with it.) It may share some superficial looks with actual rubber-like chiclet keyboards (like the ZX Spectrum keyboard or those waterproof things you can roll up), but the keys are real keys; very distinct and deliberate without needing to travel far. The connection is made by scissor switches and the keys provide just the right amount of resistance. The aluminium keyboard was prone to accidentally triggering too easily unless you were built like a crane fly.

It's not too hard to find reviews of the desktop Apple keyboard of the same model where people walked in with preconceived notions but are now converted. Here's one. I have one of those keyboards at work at a mostly-Windows-based development shop, and the usual sequence from interested visitors tends to be to ridicule me, paint me with overzealous brand loyalty (who the hell uses an Apple keyboard!?) and then trying it out for half a minute before deciding they want one themselves, damn the torpedoes, even though they'll have to remap some keys and swallow some pride. Even people who already have flat, laptop-like keyboards tend to note an improvement.

If you've tried the keyboard for a significant period of time and don't like it, I apologize. Everyone should have the right to use a keyboard they're comfortable with. But you should know that you're in a clear minority from what I've seen, and that regardless of that, the keyboard is not actually anything like a PC junior model keyboard and people tend to like it because of how it feels, not because of how it makes them feel.

Any chance Apple could use that for the next versions of Mac mini and MacBooks? Or is a Core 2 Duo with nVidia 320M still better than Fusion?

... according to Fudzilla.com

http://www.fudzilla.com/notebooks/item/20888-amd-apple-deal-is-28nm-notebooks

"Fusion goes Apple 28 / 32nm It all started here, when AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Sales Officer Emilio Ghilardi was brave enough to show an image of several Apple products in a Fusion presentation. After we wrote our part AMD was quick to deny it, perhaps a bit too quick, which gave us a reason to dig some more, only to find that we were on the right track.

We asked around and some sources close to Intel / Nvidia have denied the rumour saying that they know nothing about it. However, just a day later we managed to confirm that the leak is real and that Apple will indeed use Fusion, here.

Our industry sources have indicated that the deal will be announced in at some point 2011, that it will involve 28nm and 32nm Fusion parts particularly Krishna and that Apple plans to launch notebooks based on AMD chips. Apple is also not cold hearted on Trinity 32nm Fusion parts.

The announcement can be as far as a year away, as 28nm parts won't materialise until the second half of 2011 and since AMD doesn’t have a tablet chip, it won’t happen in iPad segment. At this point Apple doesn’t plan to use any AMD chips in desktop or server parts, but in case Bulldozer impresses us all, maybe Steve might change his mind.

So if you like Apple and love AMD, start saving money as roughly a year from now you should be able to buy Apple notebook with Fusion Krishna / Trinity class APU."

And if you want Fusion benchmarks, check the usual suspects: http://techreport.com/articles.x/19981 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked

Invest that savings into AMD Stock and when the additions happen enjoy the ride. Apple will never use Intel or AMD in their embedded devices [iPhone, iPod, iPads] as their A# ARM based CPU/GPU combo they can control and develop with incredibly high ROI.

Any chance Apple could use that for the next versions of Mac mini and MacBooks? Or is a Core 2 Duo with nVidia 320M still better than Fusion?

... according to Fudzilla.com

http://www.fudzilla.com/notebooks/item/20888-amd-apple-deal-is-28nm-notebooks

"Fusion goes Apple 28 / 32nm
It all started here, when AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Sales Officer Emilio Ghilardi was brave enough to show an image of several Apple products in a Fusion presentation. After we wrote our part AMD was quick to deny it, perhaps a bit too quick, which gave us a reason to dig some more, only to find that we were on the right track.

We asked around and some sources close to Intel / Nvidia have denied the rumour saying that they know nothing about it. However, just a day later we managed to confirm that the leak is real and that Apple will indeed use Fusion, here.

Our industry sources have indicated that the deal will be announced in at some point 2011, that it will involve 28nm and 32nm Fusion parts particularly Krishna and that Apple plans to launch notebooks based on AMD chips. Apple is also not cold hearted on Trinity 32nm Fusion parts.

The announcement can be as far as a year away, as 28nm parts won't materialise until the second half of 2011 and since AMD doesn’t have a tablet chip, it won’t happen in iPad segment. At this point Apple doesn’t plan to use any AMD chips in desktop or server parts, but in case Bulldozer impresses us all, maybe Steve might change his mind.

So if you like Apple and love AMD, start saving money as roughly a year from now you should be able to buy Apple notebook with Fusion Krishna / Trinity class APU."

And if you want Fusion benchmarks, check the usual suspects:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19981
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked

You are correct: you do not need a discreet sound card. I haven't had a discrete sound card in the last few computers I've bought or built or the past several years and games and everything sounded just fine. Every motherboard I've bought since 2004 supported 7.1 channels like the 2004 MSI K8T Neo2 Socket 939 motherboard

The article confirms this: "That brings me to the question we posed at the beginning of this review, which is whether you really need a sound card at all. The simple answer is no. You can get by with integrated audio and live blissfully unaware of what you're missing or stubbornly claim that no difference exists."

Yes, I've been wondering the same thing. Transputers contained key ideas that seem to be coming around again...
But a more crucial thing might be how much heat can you handle on one chip? These guys are already at 25-125 watts, likely depending on how many cores are actually turned on. After all they're playing pretty hefty heat management tricks on current i7's and Phenom's.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15818/2
What use are 48 cores, let alone 1000 if they're all being slowed down to 50% or whatever by heat and power juggling?

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1034
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/11/09/nvidia_geforce_gtx_580_video_card_review
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4008/nvidias-geforce-gtx-580
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1461/1/
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/19934
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/11/09/nvidia-geforce-gtx-580-review/1

I always thought stores sold stuff. The Ubu Software Center is just a GUI to a repository, not my idea of a store.

No, Ubuntu has an official store now. Where you can buy software which is not free: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/19788. I frankly don't like the idea of their store either, but at least Canonical doesn't have Apple's history, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

I haven't seen any hint that AMD will drop their line of processors that do not have integrated graphics. So there is no limiting of consumers choice that I can see.

If you had RTFA, you would have noted that AMD is only able to have a level playing field to compete because the FTC has put a stop to Intel's unfair trade practices.

It's right here: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/19547

You can also find it at the top of the page... twice, in fact.

Yes, I'm well aware that that's the joke.

You could at least provide a link to this alleged quote of yours. How are we to know that you didn't just make all that up?!?

It's right there in TFA. The link is in the summary. Read the paragraph directly below the pictures of the new badges.

That is how AMD stays in business, by cutting its prices well below the average market price for the performance rating.

But there is a large chunk of performance rating they can't even approach.

Here's last year's numbers (didn't see this year's in the first page of google results), which should give you an indication of why AMD went looking for more performance from each chip. I'm still not expecting Bulldozer to get AMD up to the top. They might match the second- and third-place chips from Intel, but they haven't come up with anything that can outright beat what Intel has fielded.

And AMD's pricing policy costs it a lot of money, since its production costs are much higher than Intel's. They've never had the kind of production efficiency Intel had, and now they have sold off their fabs and are contracting their parts out to GlobalFoundries, who charge a cash profit on each one and still aren't as efficient as Intel.

> Most games, with a few exceptions, are single-threaded applications. Gamers are much better off with a higher clocked dual core system than a slower-clocked, 6 core system.

False, for games written after 2006 - 2008. If a game is cross platform such that it is meant to run on PS3 or XBox360, then it is pretty much garanteed to be multi-threaded - you'll never get great performance if your game is single threaded on those consoles, especially on the PS3 where you have 6 SPUs.

References:
* http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060906/monkkonen_01.shtml
* http://techreport.com/articles.x/11237
* http://software.intel.com/file/1478
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor#Disadvantages
* http://scrawlfx.com/2008/06/killzone-2-uses-4-12-of-ps3s-6-cell-chip-cores

"I imagine it will be impractical for many devices"

You're right, and the summary is wrong and the article's a bit misleading.

"... will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor."

Sorta... PCIe 16x is 16 GB/s, that's with a big B for bytes. They're hoping for 7Gbps, or 875 MB/s. "the spec should move "quickly" to 7Gbps (875MB/s)." That's 1/20th the speed of 16x PCIe. They might be able to do PCIe x1 but that's it.

If they would have read the whitepaper that is all explained:

"A reliable wPCIe connection can be maintained with a relatively low data rate channel. However, to achieve meaningful performance between local and remote devices, the data rate needs to be on the order of 2 Gbps, or that of a single lane of PCIe. The only practical wireless channel that can support this capacity is 60 GHz."

So basically this can transfer wirelessly at ~500+ MB/s, so you can have wireless BD-ROM, wireless hard drives, and yes even wireless displays, since it's fast enough to transfer 1080i without any compression, but I'm sorry to dash the hopes of anyone that thought they could someday upgrade their laptop's video card by simply buying a wireless external Radeon HD 5970 or Geforce GTX 480, you will still need a GPU connected by 16x PCIe to process the video and then stream it similar to what OnLive Remote Gaming Service offers now.

Like this one? It supports 4-way CrossFire (or SLI), and has enough PCIe x16 slots to cope with three of these cards.

If it takes up 2 slots in my chassis, then as far as I'm concerned it is 2 "cards", even if it's all mounted on a single PCB.

They're making progress. Sharp is coming out with a 60" LCD with bezel widths of 2.4 mm and 4.1 mm (with video). Still room for improvement.

And oh, I'll take three :-\

Like this one? It supports 4-way CrossFire (or SLI), and has enough PCIe x16 slots to cope with three of these cards.

I wasn't singling out Macs as a separate group - I was lumping them into the same group: "PCs + Macs". But even if we use your example, Intel is STILL a supplier of graphics for those particular models. High or low performance doesn't really matter - they're selling graphics units to Apple.

And if you're wondering, here's a nice comparison:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18829

Q1 2010: Intel 43.5%, nVidia 31.5%, AMD 24.0%

They ship an ungodly amount of graphics compared to their performance.

the i7-875K offers better performance and power efficiency per dollar than just about any other desktop CPU out there."

Yep, coming in near the top at .... place 17. http://techreport.com/articles.x/18988/2

The author must be an Intel fan. Almost all the best price/performance numbers are in AMD's offerings.

As has already been said, they work that magic by bridging an Nvidia NF200 that provides the additional lanes and that communicates over the same shared 2GB/s DMI as everything else. The P55 still only provides 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes via the CPU and 8 PCI-E 2.0 lanes (that are signal rate limited) via the chipset. This limit is what potentially hurts USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 cards.

In contrast, the 890FX has 42 PCI-E 2.0 lanes. 32 dedicated to graphics slots, 4 to a PCI-E x4 slot and the rest are for single x1 slots.

Block diagram of the P55 is found here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/17513
Block diagram of the 890FX is found here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/18825

As far as it making a difference...crossfire slot speed only makes a difference when you are using it, but USB 3.0 and SATA 6 can make a difference all of the time.

It is an unfair comparison. The 890FX is a top end board while the P55 is midrange.

As has already been said, they work that magic by bridging an Nvidia NF200 that provides the additional lanes and that communicates over the same shared 2GB/s DMI as everything else. The P55 still only provides 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes via the CPU and 8 PCI-E 2.0 lanes (that are signal rate limited) via the chipset. This limit is what potentially hurts USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 cards.

In contrast, the 890FX has 42 PCI-E 2.0 lanes. 32 dedicated to graphics slots, 4 to a PCI-E x4 slot and the rest are for single x1 slots.

Block diagram of the P55 is found here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/17513
Block diagram of the 890FX is found here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/18825

As far as it making a difference...crossfire slot speed only makes a difference when you are using it, but USB 3.0 and SATA 6 can make a difference all of the time.

It is an unfair comparison. The 890FX is a top end board while the P55 is midrange.

"Surprisingly, even at stock speeds, the i7-875K offers better performance and power efficiency per dollar than just about any other desktop CPU out there."

-1, Inaccurate

The 2.8ghz i7-930 is $199 vs $342 for a 2.93ghz i7-875K, so almost double the price for 0.13ghz more. How did the author see that and think "better performance per dollar"? The article he linked to even shows the better performance per dollar in a chart, and btw techreport that chart is pretty piss poor, shoving $200 processors on a chart that goes to $1200 just clumps 90% of the processors in the $50 to $400 range. Learn how to make a chart: you should have left off under $50 (no processors under $50) and anything past $1000 (no processors over $1000). Because of your crappy chart the i7-875 is right next to the i7-930 despite the $142 difference.

The i7-930 is locked but it does reach 4ghz on air rather easily.

I suppose all of this is a mute because the LGA 1156 platform and LGA 1366 platform are being discontinued next year, so if you don't already have a i7 compatible motherboard you'd be buying a board that won't be compatible with any cpus made 7 months from now. I wouldn't buy a i7 cpu unless intel started selling them for $50, while AM3 boards available now are compatible with future 16-core cpus

Hi, you must be new. Welcome to the interweb! When you see underlined text on a "web site" you can "click" on the words to get more information. In this case if you clicked on "comes without a traditional operating system" you would have learned that "Asus ships the Eee PC 1201T with only its ExpressGate instant-on OS". Isn't that neat? Have fun!

Yup, the very same unfortunately. :(

Here're a couple of high-res images of the sockets:
http://techreport.com/r.x/clarkdale/lga1156-socket.jpg
http://www.tomshw.it/guides/hardware/cpu/20090905/images/Asus%20P55%20LGA%201156.png

Frankly, I think it's just an attempt at making MoBo manufacturers bear the brunt of the expenses instead of Intel having to dig into its buffer stock of gold bullion. :| It costs a whole ton more to build an LGA socket than it does, to build a PGA socket.

Having said all that, I tend to lean toward the theory that it's got more to do Women's Golf than a Lesbian and Gay Alliance. :P

Congratulations, you've found a niche application in which the hard drive performance limitations don't matter.

I could say the same about you. Congratulations on figuring out where SSDs absolutely shine.

My laptop used to take 15 minutes to go from "cold start" to "logged in, all applications started and usable". I timed it. I took the exact same installation across to an SSD using a ghost image, and that startup time is now 35 seconds, half of which is the BIOS POST sequence. I'm not talking about "login prompt" visible, which is bullshit, but Outlook, Visual Studio, and maybe a couple of other applications loaded and responsive, which takes a long, LONG time on a hard drive.

Oh my... 15 minutes! My old Athlon XP boots off HDD in 28 seconds. (Firefox open in < 35 seconds)

My new Phenom II X4 system boots off HDD in about ~2 minutes, but Firefox is open in about 50 seconds. Everything else gets shuffled to the background.

Benchmarks seem to indicate that perhaps some unknown factor was influencing your HDD boot times. Perhaps the drive was close to failure? Or was it one of those really low RPM drives? I'm talking about 7200RPM drives, obviously - some of them like the 2TB black are dual-head, and easily shave 40% of your boot time off, over a regular 32MB cache 7200RPM drive.

I'm not convinced everyone is better off with SSDs rather than a really fast HDD. I'm glad you've found your favourite new toy - but after playing with a few SSDs and high end HDDs, I decided the space and price was worth more than the performance, to me. Besides that, I'm talking about a desktop, and you're talking about a laptop. Of course you want an SSD in a laptop. They're power efficient and shock immune.

I'm also not compiling the linux kernel daily. I'm loading games, which benchmarks indicate would barely improve 20%. I'd much prefer to be able to put every game on a high performance drive, rather than just 3 games.

So I stand by my opinion: I'm not convinced everyone is better off with SSDs rather than a really fast HDD. But unlike you, I'm at least willing to examine all available options.

for around $500 and less than 2lbs,
there's the soon-to-be-released HP Slate:

http://geeksmack.net/hardware/1162-hp-slate-specs-reported
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18642

The diagram I saw can be seen at http://techreport.com/r.x/2009_5_26_Intel_unveils_native_eightcore_Nehalem/8p_diagram.jpg

Checking it again it looks like it's a maximum of two QPI hops to get between two processors but a maximum of three QPI hops to get from a processor to an IOH. I agree it looks like a bit of a bitch to route (but then 8 core boards are going to be expensive anyway so maybe high layer counts don't matter so much)

Tech report recently compared new generation processors with a 5 year old Pentium 4. http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448

Actually, according to this article over at TechReport ( http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448/17 ) the system price (figuring in mobo costs) for AMD procs tends to be higher per unit of performance.

( See this chart: http://techreport.com/r.x/cpu-roundup-2010q1/value-perf-bar-sysprices.gif )

Actually, according to this article over at TechReport ( http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448/17 ) the system price (figuring in mobo costs) for AMD procs tends to be higher per unit of performance.

( See this chart: http://techreport.com/r.x/cpu-roundup-2010q1/value-perf-bar-sysprices.gif )

I usually find the advice from tech report's periodical System Guide to be very useful and relevant.

Their latest report came out a couple of weeks ago. They focus on a range of options at various price points and requirements.

sorry to attempt to answer your question and not shill Apple.

Here's the problem - that works wonderfully as a theory. It fails utterly in practice.

Really? Based on what metric?

The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise. And that's not even mentioning the small developers that are being successful despite using no DRM whatsoever. Here's just one excellent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_solar_empire. Here's a bit I'm quoting from the page itself: "As of September 2008, Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, has stated that the game has sold over 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those being digital download sales, on a budget of less than $1,000,000. It sold 200,000 copies in the first month after release alone." And since the sources for that quote are extremely relevant here, I'll link those as well. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20026 http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14383

The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be.

The problems in the PC version of Dead Space are well-known: delayed movement, delayed aiming, partially rebindable keys (you can't use the cursor keys to walk because they're permanently bound to the RIG menu), etc.

It includes the older Q9400, and i5-750 beats it quite handily.

An older article comparing Q9650 and i5/i7:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17545/14

http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448/18 is the page with the conclusion

5850, no, 5870? Maybe and even then in 99.9% of games it's basically "here we see 90fps in 1920x1200 on the 4890 and we see 145 on the 5870!" Thing is I'm hitting 90fps already at 1920x1200, I (and very few) people have a 30" Apple display.

Not to say faster isn't better in the long run of couse but on a $ / speed ratio right now, the 5xxx series just isn't cutting it, far too overpriced - and to think it was ATI who saved us from Nvidia doing the exact thing when the GT series came out 18 months ago. One manufacturer is behind, jack the prices :/ (understandable I suppose)
The cheapest 5850 is about 280$ the cheapest 4890 is about 190$
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650&p=12
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17652/4

I'm just not seeing 90$ extra worth of value here for the 5850, let alone the 5870.
Within literally 8 weeks of the first review of the next nvidia card, you'll see these prices 30% less across the board, it's not a smart time to buy right now.

DESKTOP PROCESSORS
http://techreport.com/articles.x/18216/1
"As a CPU technology, Clarkdale is excellent. I can't get over how the Core i5-661 kept nearly matching the Core 2 Quad Q9400 in things like video encoding and rendering with just two cores. We've known for a while how potent the Nehalem microarchitecture can be, but seeing a dual-core processor take on a quad-core from the immediately preceding generation is, as I said, pretty mind-blowing. Clarkdale's power consumption is admirably low at peak
(...)
The integrated graphics processor on Clarkdale has, to some extent, managed to exceed my rather low expectations."

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3704
"For a HTPC there's simply none better than these new Clarkies. The on-package GPU keeps power consumption nice and low, enabling some pretty cool mini-ITX designs that we'll see this year. Then there's the feature holy-grail: Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA bitstreaming over HDMI. If you're serious about building an HTPC in 2010, you'll want one of Intel's new Core i3s or i5s."

NOTEBOOK PROCESSORS
http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3705
"From the balanced notebook perspective, Arrandale is awesome. Battery life doesn't improve, but performance goes up tremendously. The end result is better performance for hopefully the same power consumption. If you're stuck with an aging laptop it's worth the wait. If you can wait even longer we expect to see a second rev of Arrandale silicon towards the middle of the year with better power characteristics. Let's look at some other mobile markets, though.
(...)
If what you're after is raw, unadulterated performance, there are still faster options.
(...)
We are also missing something to replace the ultra-long battery life offered by the Core 2 Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) parts. "

The main benefit of the new Atom platform is its improved efficiency.

More info at:

Intel's next-gen Atom arrives in Asus' Eee PC 1005PE netbook
http://techreport.com/articles.x/18167
"Pine Trail's pseudo-system-on-chip architecture is quite a departure from the first Atom platform and an impressive achievement for Intel. Not only has the company managed to drop the number of chips and dramatically reduce the platform's footprint, but it has also lowered power consumption by a healthy margin. Those improvements should make it easier for manufacturers to churn out slimmer and lighter netbooks with better battery life than ever before."

Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3692
"First, new vs. old Atom. With a real world performance improvement approaching 10% on the desktop, I'm happy with the performance of Pine Trail. Short of Intel introducing a brand new architecture, Atom isn't going to get much better, so the fact that we're getting anything is worth being happy about.
The impact of the on-die memory controller is noticeable on overall system performance. As I said earlier, my Pine Trail testbed was snappier and more responsive than my older Atom machines. It's by no means fast, but it's noticeably faster than before.
Power consumption is also much improved thanks to Intel ditching the archaic 945 chipset. Although the impact on battery life in netbooks is going to be more exciting than drawing less power at the wall. Pine Trail is worth waiting for."

ASUS Eee PC 1005PE: Pineview Arrives
http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3693
"The latest release of Atom brings quite a few changes, but the net result isn't quite as impressive as we were hoping. We have an integrated memory controller in the CPU along with a GPU on package. Those are cost saving measures that also provide some benefits in terms of power requirements. What they apparently don't provide is a significant improvement in performance. Anand saw around a 10% improvement in performance relative to Diamondville on the desktop, but the real problem is what we didn't get.
Specifically, Pineview needed a lot more than GMA 3150 to make it attractive. Given a choice between N280 ION and N450 Pineview, ION will offer a better overall experience for the vast majority of users. If you want to do a silent HTPC, Pineview is going to need some form of external graphics, making the GMA 3150 a waste of space. We would have been much happier if Intel had included GMA 4500 instead, and even then it would be underpowered compared to ION."

I have read that there's also the possibility of adding a Broadcom decoder chip to offload the work of video decoding, which might allow 1080p video while keeping power consumption low.

Yup, as referenced in The Tech Report's review (and Intel's system diagram):

• "The GMA 3150 can assist the decoding of plain old MPEG2 video, but that's about it. Intel recommends using an auxiliary video decoder chip, available from third parties like Broadcom, to facilitate HD video playback."

I have read that there's also the possibility of adding a Broadcom decoder chip to offload the work of video decoding, which might allow 1080p video while keeping power consumption low.

Yup, as referenced in The Tech Report's review (and Intel's system diagram):

• "The GMA 3150 can assist the decoding of plain old MPEG2 video, but that's about it. Intel recommends using an auxiliary video decoder chip, available from third parties like Broadcom, to facilitate HD video playback."

Having worked for a desktop/laptop repair contractor for Best Buy, I do not take even warranty service seriously (though I'm not bashing my former employer, we all were competent people who did the best we could even though people often had no resources or idea what was going on ;)

Go into a BB store and look at their "no lemons" policy. If a new item has to be returned four times you get credit or a new computer. An item should have to be returned no more than once!

...And you never know when a popular chip maker will ship a bad batch out the door leaving the computer vendor's Indian or Filipino tech support to lie about it and try to blame it on the customer (ahem, HP). Meanwhile, my ancient Dell Latitude D600 still chugs along nicely after all these years, even after having been dropped, left in direct sunlight, and splashed poolside. I haven't even had to blow air through it yet.

It's a sad state of consumer affairs when older electronics outlast newer ones.

It's 6 years max. Personally, I'd expect any electronic with minimal moving parts to last 6 years - the limitation should be down to the MTBF of the components, eg a Seagate Barracuda has an MTBF of 750,000 hours according to this site, which is 85 years! So, barring hinges on the screen, keyboard, DVD/floppy and connector failures and failures due to user clumsiness - that laptop should last the 6 years easily - or so I would argue if it broke...

> Ok well if you do care about games, then you want a discreet graphics solution.

The graphics hardware for games tend to be rather indiscreet. Big rapidly spinning fans, hot, noisy, lots of shiny/glossy metal and big.

See the second pic:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17986

Integrated graphics solutions (which are nondiscrete) tend to be way more discrete. Just one small chip (or even just part of another chip), quiet, fanless, small.

we can't assume people bought their computer last week

True, but if they've got even a Pentium 4 (remember those?), they can get 2 to 5 GB/sec. See:

A 2Ghz P4 can get 2GB/sec for ordinary "integer" code

and up to 5GB/sec for better optimized SSE2 code.

Those CPUs are old, and they could still mix an entire orchestra, in real time, without breaking a sweat.

Take a look at the bar graph at the bottom, most CPUs released in the last few years easily do 5GB+ even for "integer" code (SSE3 would be more than double), and the Core i7s do 25GB/sec, which is higher than I thought.

There's just no need to 'standardize' on anything, or even have kernel-mode drivers for anything other than basic "input" or "output". Write your sound mixing code in ordinary C (even Java or C# would be fast enough!), and just send it down the line...

Heck, take a look at software defined radio, there's just no need for dedicated hardware for a lot of things when the CPU is so ridiculously powerful.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16486

Well if you RTFA (I know, but I got bored) it says they tested a 785G from ATI and found that renaming did nothing, and of course it kicked Intel's butt, surprise surprise. I mean is there anyone at this point that doesn't know Intel IGP = Big can of fail, and that pretty much the only reason you see them so much is they are dirt cheap?

But if you would like some benchmarks of actual games and BD playback using both the ATI and Intel chips here you are, enjoy. As someone who recently switched from being a lifelong Intel+Nvidia guy (the bad solder fiasco put me off Nvidia, and the "bang for the buck" on the new dual and quads is just great) that I was quite surprised when I was able to game for nearly a month and a half on the AMD IGP (a 780V board) before I got around to picking me up a 4650. Granted I'm not playing Crysis at 1080p, but for games I do enjoy, like FEAR and Bioshock it was quite an enjoyable experience, with none of that "slideshow" BS that I always got even on old games with an Intel IGP.

Frankly I think the only way you could do worse than an Intel IGP would be one of the SiS IGP "offerings". I've had to deal with quite a few of those in customer's "Best Buy Specials" and pretty much anything more than drawing the desktop and its gonna suck. But anybody who buys an Intel IGP PC and expects to do anything on it more than watching some vids is just asking for hurt. Considering how lousy their IGPs are at...well just about everything, is it any wonder that Intel resorted to cheating? I'm surprised with all the blunders that Nvidia has made of late that Intel doesn't just buy them out. At least then they would have IGPs like the Ion that are halfway decent.

Damnit, should have used preview. That should have read "as they've put all current R&D on hold".

That's a different fabrication that was rebutted a couple of days ago. The exiting of the chipset market appears to be real, as they've put .

That's a different fabrication that was rebutted a couple of days ago. The exiting of the chipset market appears to be real, as they've put .

Anandtech
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643
"At the end of the day, with its impressive performance and next-generation feature set, the Radeon HD 5870 kicks off the DirectX 11 generation with a bang and manages to take home the single-GPU performance crown in the process. It's without a doubt the high-end card to get"

Techreport
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17618
"Well, Sherlock, what do you expect me to say? AMD has succeeded in delivering the first DirectX 11 GPU by some number of months, perhaps more than just a few, depending on how quickly Nvidia can get its DX11 part to market. AMD has also managed to double its graphics and compute performance outright from one generation to the next, while ratcheting up image quality at the same time. The Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest GPU on the planet, with the best visual output, and the most compelling set of features. Yet it's still a mid-sized chip by GPU standards. As a result, the 5870's power draw, noise levels, and GPU temperatures are all admirably low. My one gripe: I wish the board wasn't quite so long, because it may face clearance issues in some enclosures. "