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Graphics-Enabled CPUs To Take Off In 2011
angry tapir writes "Half the notebook computers and a growing number of desktops shipped in 2011 will run on graphics-enabled microprocessors as designers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) increase competition for the units that raise multimedia speeds without add-ons. The processors with built-in graphics capabilities will be installed this year on 115 million notebooks, half of total shipments, and 63 million desktop PCs, or 45 percent of the total, according to analysts."
I tried looking for a sandy bridge laptop with a 15" screen showing 1920x1200 resolution using built-in graphics, but it seems vendors are now using a power slurping external GPU as a luxury that you must have if you want a decent screen. I don't game nor do I have any need for CAD/CAM like applications, I just need a decent resolution/dpi on my laptop and integrated graphics would make the machine cheaper and less power-hungry, so ideal for developing. Alas, I will probably end-up with some Quadro or other high-end GPU just I want a normal screen.
Nope, that was 1911.
It was about time !!! Spent ages waiting for that. I have one question though....What about its power consumption/ heat transmission, diffusion? No doubt that engineers will have to rethink the cooling schema for these processors.
So there will be more computers with crappy integrated graphics. Hopefully, it will still be possible to upgrade them with a decent graphics card.
Oh, and btw, wasn't the plan until recently to basically replace the CPU with the GPU? I'm confused...
Depending on how exactly these processors will look like, they may be very interesting for speeding up scientific computations. The fastest computer in the world at this moment is already GPU based, and such a CPU/GPU hybrid can possibly be even more efficient by removing the slow communication between CPU and GPU.
Integrated graphics is still integrated graphics. They are still slow, still useless for games (unless you are a self masochist), and still nothing impressive. Effort would be better placed in producing an open system and standards for coding to graphics to hardware directly instead of using flabbly cycle hogging API's. That's why pathetic hardware like the Xbox 360 can do so much with so little. Think of the days of DOS and Commodore 4K graphics demos.
And the wheel of reincarnation turns another step.
One of the good things about having the GPU integrated in the processor chip itself is you don't have to go through the bus, so this reduces latency and leaves more bandwidth for everything else.
...CPU handling the graphics in laptops is already causing overheating issues.
Two cases in point, a Toshiba laptop with AMD and a 13" MacBook Pro with Intel, the fans run annoyingly at high speed, the bottoms are hot enough to fry eggs on. That's just sitting with one web page open. How long can one expect machine like that to last? A year? two maybe?
Are web pages going to suddenly tone down their act, quit using video, animation, Flash? Text and pictures only? If they do that, then what? Hardware makers only start making laptops that can handle web text?
Dedicated graphics is the way to go, CPU and graphics on separate dies away from each other, separate the heat sources.
I can just imagine the scene where a bunch of power hungry types just made the decision to move towards integrated graphics, and a highly intelligent engineer just stomping out of the boardroom in protest.
This is ontopicish, isn't it? And it's all ready out there. (Hasn't probably "taken off" (depending on the definition of that), though...)
I'd love to have a Toshiba AC100 smartbook with an Nvidia Tegra ARM cpu. Capable of HD output, 9 h battery (on lighter usage IIRC). About 800 grams. Runs Android, but an Ubuntu port is progressing, from what I can tell.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Way back near the dawn of time, Intel created the 8086, and its slightly less capable little brother, the 8088. And they were reasonable processors ... but although they were good at arithmetic, it was within tight constraints. Fractions were just too hard. Trigonometry sent the poor little souls into a spin. And so on.
And thus, the 8087 was born. It was able to carry the burden of floating point mathematical functions, thereby making things nice and fast for those few who were willing to pony up the cash for the chip.
Then out came the 80286 (let's forget about the 80186, it's not really all that relevant here). It was better at arithmetic than the 8086, but still couldn't handle floating point - so it had a friend, the 80287, that filled the same purpose for the 80286 as the 8087 did for the 8086 and 8088. (We'll blithely ignore Weitek's offerings here. They existed. They're not really germane to the discussion.)
Then the 80386. Much, much better at arithmetic than the 80286, but floating point was still an Achilles heel - so the 80387 came along for the ride.
And finally, the i486. By this stage, transistors had become small enough that Intel could integrate the FPU on die - so there was no i487. At least, not until they came out with the i486SX, which I'll blithely ignore. And so, an accelerator chip that was once hideously expensive and used only by a few who really needed it was integrated onto chips that everybody would buy.
Funnily enough, it was around the time that the i486 appeared that graphics accelerators came onto the scene - first for 2D (who remembers the Tseng Labs W32p?), and then for 3D. Expensive, used only by a few who could justify the cost ... is this starting to sound familiar to you?
So another cycle is beginning to complete, and more functionality that used to be discrete is now to be folded onto the CPU. I can't help but wonder ... what will be next?
Something like the MacBook Pro where there is basic graphics integrated into the CPU (favors power consumption) and optional high end graphics available from a discrete GPU (favors performance)?
"Energy-efficient graphics.
Thanks to the new microarchitecture, the graphics processor is on the same chip as the central processor and has direct access to L3 cache. That proximity translates into performance. The graphics processor also automatically increases clock speeds for higher workloads. An integrated video encoder enables HD video calls with FaceTime, while an efficient decoder gives you long battery life when you’re watching DVDs or iTunes movies.
Up to 3x quicker on the draw. And the render.
When you need more performance for things like playing 3D games, editing HD video, or even running CAD software, the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models automatically switch to discrete AMD Radeon graphics that let you see more frames per second and experience better responsiveness. With up to 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 video memory, these processors provide up to 3x faster performance than the previous generation."
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html
It may not be the year of Linux on the Desktop but it WILL be the Year of the Linux on your Mobile.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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Having a low power graphics chip generates more heat??
No sig today...
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Having a low power graphics chip generates more heat??
It's only low powered when compared to other discrete graphics solutions, not when compared to a bare CPU lacking any integrated GPU function. Yes, they are low power. But only in relative terms, not in absolute ones.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
As long as they cost less than half of what I'll spend to replace them
OR
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
Verdict
The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen.
And I have an Atom N270-based netbook that, probably 90% of the time, is on passive cooling. It *has* a fan, but that fan is almost never on when all I'm doing is surfing the web, writing a document, or working in a spreadsheet.
Yes, they're going to increase power consumption a little, but you're forgetting how low the power and heat requirements are for these devices in the first place. If the fan has to run 20% of the time instead of 10%, it may shorten the battery life by 30 minutes total, over the course of the 6 hour life that the battery currently has? And that's a 2-year old netbook (Dell Mini 9)... batteries and CPU's have gotten better in the mean time. That's not even considering the power savings from not having to power a discrete (Intel X3100) graphics card... I could actually see a noticeable *increase* in battery life thanks to this.
Well, on the bright side, 2011 is going to be the year of Duke Nukem Forever, so there's hope for Linux on the Desktop! ;-)
IGP's are sufficient for most games. Yes, you read that right. IGP's with good drivers are sufficient for playing the games that most people play. These include Flash games (Farmville) and the "demo" games that come with a typical OS installation (Solitaire).
I hate how supposed "gamers" dominate any discussion that remotely has anything to do with computer graphics. Not everybody wants to play Crysis (and I don't even know what that is, without a quick peek at Wikipedia).
It is very nice to see that competition is pushing the market to get better and better :)
most PCs already ship with IGPs, this is the same thing, right? Joe Consumer doesn't know what the hell a graphics card is, or really any other component for that matter. Integrated Graphics is getting better, but 10 x 0 is still 0. All the new architectures coming out are including Graphics on them, so it's obvious that this would take off, given the huge number of PCs that don't ship with dedicated graphics anyway. The average person will pay more for a "better" CPU, even if they don't know what that means, but to them, the concept of a graphics card is too confusing to understand. The fact that the new 13" Macbook Pro is integrated only can only help this trend, because I'm sure that model will get the most sales, it's the first choice of every person I know going into college, as well as being more than adequate for most consumers.
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And I have an Atom N270-based netbook that, probably 90% of the time, is on passive cooling. It *has* a fan, but that fan is almost never on when all I'm doing is surfing the web, writing a document, or working in a spreadsheet.
Yes, they're going to increase power consumption a little, but you're forgetting how low the power and heat requirements are for these devices in the first place. If the fan has to run 20% of the time instead of 10%, it may shorten the battery life by 30 minutes total, over the course of the 6 hour life that the battery currently has? And that's a 2-year old netbook (Dell Mini 9)... batteries and CPU's have gotten better in the mean time. That's not even considering the power savings from not having to power a discrete (Intel X3100) graphics card... I could actually see a noticeable *increase* in battery life thanks to this.
Since when is the x3100 a discrete card? I think there may be other factors in your analysis. For example, the latest atom chips have a version of the 3 series intel graphics ...
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
The whole reason graphics was separated out is it is so damn math intensive. In particular, it calls for a certain kind of parallel math that CPUs aren't, or perhaps more accurately weren't, very good at. Building a real general purpose CPU which could do good 3D was just not possible. Slowly it is becoming more possible. We are still a long way off, but approaching it.
Ultimately everything on one CPU is what we want. However it isn't possible for high end 3D, hence it gets put off to a separate combination vector processor and ASIC. As thing progress, hopefully we can bring it back in.
Will anything new come along? Dunno, we'll just have to see.
They also said 2011 would be the year of Linux on the desktop!
This is the year of Linux on my desktop, as was 2010 and every other year back to 1998. If it is not the year of Linux on the desktop for you then I am sorry for you, I really am.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Well, on the bright side, 2011 is going to be the year of Duke Nukem Forever, so there's hope for Linux on the Desktop! ;-)
Indeed, though many people may know it first as "Android on the Desktop".
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
At one point most gamers had dedicated sound cards. Eventually the technology caught up and almost every gamer now uses integrated sound.
Graphics will eventually get that way. It won't be this year but that is the trend.
I owned a 386 that was faster than a 486. 386sx 50MHz > 486 25Mhz. Explain that, Mr. Wizzard.
They also said 2011 would be the year of Linux on the desktop!
They also said that Linux is still for faggots.
While your statement is true, it is a very narrow subset of who Linux is for. Linux is also for midgets, Asians, Christians, elves, drug traffickers, airline pilots, geeks, dentists, evil geniuses, Pixair, etc... I think you are trying to be inflammatory...
There's no place like
Sorry, but this doesn't work for me. Floating point operations are perfect for integrating with the CPU because they are instruction-level commands whose results may be used on an instruction-by-instruction basis. Furthermore, there's a pretty hard limit on how many/much of an FPU someone needs: one per core, most likely? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
With GPUs, there's no limit to how powerful, fast, memory-caching, and power-hungry they need to be. The ceiling keeps rising. It doesn't scale exactly with processing demands, as FPU requirements do/did.
If a resource scales differently for different users, it'll probably never be fully integrated with the CPU. Graphics processors are being added now, because there's a low enough ceiling for what many users want and need. But separate GPUs will probably never disappear. The task they perform is highly unrelated and separate from that of the CPU.
And it's not like this new technology is actually binding the two together (unless I've missed something), it just puts them side-by-side on the same chip so that Intel and AMD can make more money from the bundle. If anything, this trend leads eventually toward preprinted motherboards complete with all features (RAM etc), not CPUs which perform lots of different functions.
What happens when you click a link? Will you be able to flush the buffer? Will you be able to defrag this type of card? Will you be able to prevent screen captures by a rogue device like this? Will you trust a device like this?
Not me Ladies & Gentlemen. If you think of all the malware combined, you have seen nothing yet until this is released.