Intel reveals GPU roadmap with hybrid integrated discrete graphics Intel laid out its future graphics accelerator roadmap to investors on Thursday, which includes plans to blur the lines between integrated and discrete graphics. The chip giant said it will ship its discrete desktop Arc GPUs, code-named Alchemist, in the second quarter of this year. The Arc GPUs will appear in laptops before …
...this right here is how you do it:
It would appear forthcoming processors with SDSi may be arbitrarily restricting some features until obtaining a ‘license’ after the fact.
Look, we all know when we're getting screwed. Payment is a social contract just as much as a legal one. You did work, and you deserve to get paid for that work. That's fair. Making me pay for something I already have breaks the contract. I'm clearly not paying for all your hard work, because it's very obvious that it doesn't actually cost you more to give it to me or not - seeing as you have in fact done that, you just expect me to pay again despite having already bought the thing, and despite the hardware in question being right fucking there already.
Car companies keep trying this and it is pissing consumers off. Everyone needs to cut this shit out.
Car companies keep trying this and it is pissing consumers off. Everyone needs to cut this shit out.It's particularly egregious now that cars contain tens or hundreds of microcontrollers and so much functionality can simply be code that's gated based on where the model or trim level sits in the hierarchy.
It indeed is just like you wrote - it is cheaper for car manufacturers tu put everything in their cars software und lock/unlock it via configuration and diagnostics.
I hear that the language one needs to learn in order to get car features unlocked is Russian. Their online fora are full of easy to follow guides on unlocking and enabling everything. I hear car manufacturers are trying to fight it but with not much success.
I cant find any figures out there but when I was a lad CMOS you weren't using was not a noticeable power drain, it was as good as off. Now with these sub 10nm processes I'd put money on there being leakage that could easily amount to a significant power drain unless there is no power to it. So that's going to be either some noticeable real estate wasted to isolate it or a waste of power. Either way the customer is going to end up paying for something they aren't using.
This isn't that rare. Even our beloved RasPi had "optional" licenses you could pick up to enable certain proprietary functions in hardware (mostly video decoding related) for a couple of quid. On the plus side, if you weren't using them you didn't need to buy those licenses.
Subscription everything is the new normal; and I hate it passionately. Generation rent, indeed.
As soon as I read "super exciting", my bullshit filter kicked in an I was unable to read the following text to extract facts. Followed by "can't be called integrated or discrete". Please. Of course it can be, because it is either the former (as in standalone) or the latter. Being young, the first time I encountered this kind of, erm, marketing vocabulary, on the then popular tape casette recorders, half of which sported the word DIGITAL, written in capital letters in some sort of digital looking type face. Inoperative turbo buttons. Laser quality ink printers. Cloud ethernet switches. AI coffee mugs and vacuum cleaners. We people just can't seem to get enough of lies marketing language and always want more.
It is clearly a bold stance.
Unfortunately, it's not because you are going to be able to stack chips on top of one another that, all of a sudden, you're going to become a graphics king.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are very capable people working at Intel, that I will not dispute. But there are also very capable people working at Nvidia, and Nvidia has twenty years of experience in high-end graphics. Intel ? Not so much.
So I'm glad that you've set the bar to high expectations. Unfortunately, I have never counted on Intel to power my gaming sessions, and I have no reason to think that that is going to change any time soon.
I am willing to be pleasantly surprised, though.
In relative terms, Intel GPUs always have been utter crap, but they were (are?) very FOSS-compatible, and, for the average user, good enough.
If this proposition is that Intel will ship chips that are closer in capability to the nVidia/ATi(AMD) establishment, then great, so long as the drivers remain free.
Have to say that I would prefer that nVidia and AMD open-source their drivers.
-A.
Intel onboard GFX since Skylake I would describe as "surprising". I would never have remotely considered them viable for anything but office desktop up until that point.
I had a 6700K, initially without a GPU at all and got by reasonably well for a time in some fairly heavy games. Elite dangerous for instance, worked pretty well even on that limited hardware.
In todays insanity market I can totally see a budget conscious PC enthusiast looking at onboard as a very, very good idea. £300 for an "extremely average" GPU's is not even remotely competitive compared to where the supply chain was at the beginning of 2019.
Yes, yes, inflation, supply shortages, transport, other excuses yada. Bad value is bad value, and if PC's remain bad value people will look for alternatives. Cue Chromebook, Consoles (also bad value at the moment!)
Intel backing GPUs at a strategic level is very, very important to them. It's important to maintaining shifting of x86 boxen. In the absence of Nvidia or AMD upping their output to meaningful levels to compensate.
In a separate speech, Intel's software group senior vice president Greg Lavender said the company is the top contributor to the Linux kernel, and employed more than 120 maintainers of key open-source technologies.
Intel tries to get out kernel source code for new hardware support and feature enablement early ahead of chip launches
This is a cost of them doing business and they should be called out for trying to sound like they were "donating back to the community" (which is how it came across to me). If they weren't doing this then a bunch of their stuff wouldn't work and so wouldn't be sold.
They have almost certainly got people doing similar for Microsoft, and if they didn't with Apple, then perhaps this is why Apple went down the M1 route
Having issues finding a convincing upgrade path for my 2014 980M rig based on PassMark information, it seems Intel should not have a hard time blowing NVIDIA and AMD Radeon out of the water.
These guys have been sitting on the lazy chair for the last 5 years, the only thing they hiked are the prices, not the performance of their cards.
Paying $700 and more for a mid range card is a real tribute to the comfy Oligopoly these guys enjoy at the moment.
The big question is how fast game developers will support the new Intel cards, which is required in order to achieve a market share significant enough to create competition in the graphics card market.
I do find it amusing that when I make similar arguments to yours on other forums that brand-whores will try and leap to the defence of their favourite hardware company.
I love a good AMD as much as the next PC fan; but the 6500 launch is absolutely indefensible as anything other than a cash grab.
That 2014 rig; you will be doubly challenged to find a suitable upgrade; as I am guessing it's PCI3; so even a "current" mid range card would probably offer zero benefit whatsoever without also swapping out the motherboard.
I'd say the best value CPU/GPU deals on the market right now are those with embedded gfx; unless you have unlimited budget. Intel can absolutely make a difference here, if they don't go too greedy. They may well price low in order to generate market uptake too.
Quote: "The big question is how fast game developers will support the new Intel cards"
Do game devs really need to do anything to support Intel?
Games, more specifically game engines, don't target specific cards or vendor architecture, they target an API, such as DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan. The vendors then provide drivers that support those APIs on their hardware.
Intel already provide these APIs for their existing embedded GFX, and games already work there. Not as fast as a discrete chipset from AMD or Nvidia of course, but typically modern games are still playable if on lower settings.
Granted, they might have some optimisations to do, getting the drivers to work well with specific game engines, or specific games, such as when Nvidia puts out game ready drivers.
Either way, competition is good. Be interesting to see where their performance vs price comes in, and if they actually manage to sell at retail!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
