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Intel Open-Sources Broadwell GPU Driver & Indicates Major Silicon Changes
An anonymous reader writes "Intel shipped open-source Broadwell graphics driver support for Linux this weekend. While building upon the existing Intel Linux GPU driver, the kernel driver changes are significant in size for Broadwell. Code comments from Intel indicate that these processors shipping in 2014 will have "some of the biggest changes we've seen on the execution and memory management side of the GPU" and "dwarf any other silicon iteration during my tenure, and certainly can compete with the likes of the gen3->gen4 changes." Come next year, Intel may now be able to better take on AMD and NVIDIA discrete graphics solutions."
It's not like AMD, nVidia, PowerVR, etc. are standing still Every year brings better graphics, and Intel needs to keep pace.
But since they came late to the game, they have a patent minefield in front of them.
For low and some mid-range stuff, sure. But Intel is never going to be able to get above that so long as nVidia and AMD keep cranking out new components year after year. All Intel should be striving for is decent 4K@60 support, making sure multi-monitor systems don't break, and that compositing works as intended.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
For low and some mid-range stuff, sure. But Intel is never going to be able to get above that so long as nVidia and AMD keep cranking out new components year after year
Personally I love the thought (and so does the market, and manufactures) of getting a more powerful Fanless; Cheap; supported by reliable first party open source developers discreet GPU. That gives me a massive boost over what I am getting over my current APU performance. In reality its only a few specialists (albeit more newsworthy) that really buy into the high end anyway.
There is only one change I'd like to see made sooner rather than later:
Stop using my main memory as a video buffer!!!
The main reason I opt for discrete graphics solutions is not because of the performance of the graphics, but the lack of main memory throughput degradation. I build boxes to compute, not sling graphics.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Discrete math coprocessors are actually the interesting one, because they were integrated, and then un-integrated again. We just re-named them to "GPUs" (that is after all all a GPU is, a very parallel vector maths processor, with a tiny bit of rasterisation hardware tacked onto it). That said, yes I fully expect that integration of GPUs is only going to continue.
Sure, if you ignore either the price or the performance you can imagine your statement to be true.
"His name was James Damore."
You really REALLY need to look at what you are testing.
We are heavy users of OpenGL, and care critically about its performance.
And from that point of view, you are very VeRy wrong.
all current intel GMA implementations (even the super rare super-cache based implementations) are
terribly terrible slow compared even to old 8800gt.
we are talking significantly less than half the performance in many more advanced uses.
Yes, they can flat shade a limited number of polys quite well, and even do a little multitex, but its not
2001 any more.. we expect a little more these days.
Hit them with a few more advanced techniques and they really hit the wall, fast.
Not quite as fast as earlier GMA of course, but certainly not comparible to real hardware.
Maybe, but that is comparing low power notebook chips. Try comparing it in desktops and the picture changes by quite a bit. Of course, it is also worth considering that a modern Haswell CPU uses 84W of power while a modern AMD GPU uses 300W of power. If you gave Intel 300W of power to work with, I'm sure they could come up with something impressive.
Since Linux is about 2% of the total installed OS market and since the percentage of THAT market that plays games is limited, I doubt that Intel and AMD care very much about it. Linux on the desktop is a fantasy, I recall hearing "year of the Linux desktop" back in 1994, still hasn't happened...
In fairness, everyone likes to compare Intel's GPU that has to fit into the CPU die and use perhaps 15W of power against an AMD or nVidia GPU that can use 150W or more of power. There is just no comparison. Give Intel 150W of power to play with and I'm sure they could do something interesting with it.
Maybe, but once it moves from "Linux desktop computer that you can do anything with" to "Linux appliance that you can't make any unapproved changes to", the difference becomes academic.
I don't know if you've noticed, but desktops are a niche market now. We're almost five years passed the point where laptop sales passed desktop sales, and that trend hasn't changed. Laptop parts are where the high volumes are and that's where the big profits come from. Ask SGI some time how focussing on the high end and ignoring the mass market works as a strategy in the GPU business.
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I'm sure Intel is deeply disappointed to only have 60% of the GPU market. The board and shareholders must be crying all the way to the bank.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that it's exactly what SGI said in the mid '90s. That other companies were welcome to the low-end commodity GPU market, they'd keep the profitable high end graphical workstation market. Unfortunately for them, the cheaper parts kept improving and gradually passed a lot of people's thresholds for 'good enough'. Intel sells 4 GPUs for every one that nVidia sells and 3 for every one that AMD sells. That gives the a lot of money to spend on R&D.
Another relevant object lesson is FireWire vs USB. FireWire was better by almost every objective measure, except that it was a discrete part that added $1 to the cost of a motherboard, whereas USB came for free with the southbridge chip. For most people, the comparatively slow speed and high CPU usage of USB were still good enough. FireWire was relegated to a niche. FireWire was still faster than USB (in practice, if not on paper), and FireWire 800 was a lot faster, but by then the number of boards shipping with FireWire was small and so it lost on economies of scale and that $1 became closer to $5 for the smaller production runs. No one had to make a choice between FireWire or USB, they chose between USB or FireWire and USB, and for most users the extra cost of adding FireWire wasn't worth it. The same choice is happening today: do you want an Intel GPU, or an Intel GPU and an nVidia GPU? If the former is good enough, then why would you bother with both. In both cases, Intel gets some money for their R&D department to spend on the next generation. nVidia only does if you opt for both.
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Having the GPU integrated into the same chip as the CPU is not the same as emulating it.
Just to clarify, breaking up the list into $20 segments:
$80...$100 The highest benchmark score for Intel is 3781 with the G3430, and the highest benchmark score for AMD is 4353 with the AMD A8-5600K
$100..$120 The highest benchmark score for Intel is 4399 with the i3-3225, and the highest benchmark score for AMD is 6401 with the FX-6300.
$120..$140 The highest benchmark score for Intel is 4928 with the i3-4130, and the highest benchmark score for AMD is 6609 with the FX-8120.
$140..$160 The highest benchmark score for Intel is 4831 with the i3-3250, and the highest benchmark score for AMD is 8134 with the FX-8320.
$160..$180 The highest benchmark score for Intel is 6202 with the i5-3350P. AMD has no parts in this price segment but still wins using any of the previous 3.
$180..$200 The highest benchmark score for Intel is 7018 with the i5-4570, and the highest benchmark score for AMD is 9082 with the FX-8350
Intel "wins" most of the remaining segments by default like it did the $160..$180 segment, but doesn't surpass the $180..$200 winner in performance until you spend $264.99 on the Xeon E3-1240 V2.
So the facts are that AMD not only continues to win the performance per dollar comparison, they are still completely dominating it. Sure, if you are going to spend $300+ just on a CPU then Intel wont let you down, but it takes someone very bad at math to claim that Intel is even close to competing in the performance per dollar comparison. BOOM! HEADSHOT
"His name was James Damore."
NewEgg also sells assembled machines. Want to take a guess at what proportion of their total sales each make up? If you don't believe me, go and look up the numbers. Last ones I read, well under 5% of all computers sold ever received an after-market upgrade, and most of those were just RAM upgrades.
When you're talking about a market with a billion or so sales every year, it's not surprising that there are companies that do well catering to a fraction of a percent of the total market, but that doesn't mean that they're statistically relevant to the overall shape of the market.
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