Intel Discrete Graphics Chips Confirmed 159
Arun Demeure writes "There have been rumors of Intel's re-entry into discrete graphics for months. Now Beyond3D reports that Intel has copped to the project on their own site. They describe it as a 'many-core' architecture aimed at 'high-end client platforms,' but also extending to other market segments in the future, with 'plans for accelerated CPU integration.' This might also encourage others to follow Intel's strategy of open-sourcing their Linux drivers. So, better watch out NVIDIA and AMD/ATI — there's new competition on the horizon."
More competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly they are efficient (Score:5, Insightful)
But they invariably _have_ to have some benchmark-breaking super-card to grab the headlines with. The way it works is that while only a minority of people will actually buy the top-end graphics card, there are millions of people who just need a reminder that "nVidia is fast" or "ATIs are fast". They'll go to some benchmark site to see some "nVidia's 8800 GTX is faster than ATI's X1900XTX!" article (not entirely unexpected, it's one generation ahead), end up with some vague "nVidia is faster than ATI" idea, then go buy a 5200. Which is the lowest end of two generations behind the ATI, or 3 behind that 8800 GTX.
Both ATI and nVidia even went through times of not even trying to produce or sell much of their headline-grabbing card. And at least ATI always introduces their latest technology in their mid-range cards first, and they tend to be reasonably energy efficient cards too. But it's like a chicken contest: the one who pulls out loses. The moment one of them gave up on having an ultra-high end card at all, the benchmark sites and willy-waver forums would proclaim "company X loses the high performance graphics battle!"
I don't think Intel will manage to restore sanity in that arena, sadly. Most likely Intel will end up playing the same game, with one overclocked noisy card to grab the headlines for their saner cards.
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Technologicly, it does. But then there's the part about market economics, you charge what the market w
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The voltage required for a device depends on the device complexity, and the frequency - for every device, you can find a sweet-spot in terms of voltage per unit frequency, after which you tend to get decreasing returns. By selling a device clocked at its "sweet sp
Re:Mostly they are efficient (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm in the minority of people here, but I've always gone to sites that have actual reviews of the card I will potentially be buying. Companies have different models and each one of those models of product has its own advantages and disadvantages. I think a lot of the people that do a lot of shopping comparison online (i.e. most of the market that's actually going to be buying/installing their own graphics card) know this and do the same. ATI and Nvidia cards are only going to sell to a certain section of the market other than OEMs, and I doubt very severely that this is the approach that the type of people upgrading video cards would use in determining which card to purchase. I know I usually check out anandtech.com and look for benchmarks on the price range that I'm in.
This is like saying "Alpine stereos are better" and buying the lowest model level alpine without comparing it to anything else in the price range, nobody who is going to be installing it themselves can be that stupid, unless they were fanboys looking for a reason to hype up their favorite company anyway. Either way it doesn't look like a real market strategy to me.
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I doubt that a majority of slashdot readers don't do the same thing, that said I don't know if you have seen but the website usually compares boards in the same range but don't provide the prices of the boards, so you have to build yourself the graph with the performance/price comparison.
So it's not so easy to do the comparison..
Re:Mostly they are efficient (Score:4, Funny)
"Oooh look! 256MB RAM! That shiiiny FX5200 has to be better than my friend's 128MB 9700 Pro"
I meant it's marketting (Score:2)
Sure, we all like to pretend that we're, like, all intelligent and stuff, and would
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And, for some of us, we don't even need to know if it's all that fast. As long as it's properly supported by Xorg.
The nVidia video card on my FreeBSD box died the other week. I went to my local PC shop, got the chea
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The high end cards are useful for two reasons:
- They give game developers something to work on so they can target mid-range performance levels a year in the future.
- They keep the pressure on to continue significant performance improvements.
People will always complain about having to upgrade / buy new hardware, but go play through Half Life I after playing Half Life II and tell me that the graphics improvements were "a waste of money" or "utterly unnecessary for the enjoyment of the game". I enjoy decen
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Competition is almost always good, so I look forward to this. I'd like to see Intel push ATI and Nvidia to create more power efficient chips, as it's quite rediculous right now.
No kidding! Looking at video cards to get away from dreaded shared memory I couldn't believe what they want for anything decent that wouldn't burn a hole in anything it touched (heat/cost). And given Intel's history of Open Source drivers for the wireless, I am not holding on waiting for them. AMD/ATI, I hope AMD makes ATI manag
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Intel Video hardware is just nice... (Score:4, Informative)
Intel drivers for Linux Just Work(TM). I installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my Acer notebook, with a i915g video adapter, and everything worked without any extra effort. And I'm even able to use Beryl/Compiz as my default window manager, without any stability issues.
Both nVidia and ATI should learn from Intel.
What desktop motherboard? (Score:2)
Are Intel's own-brand motherboards worth it? In the past I've bought Asus but that was for AMD-based systems.
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I've looked around for boards with these chips and found them in several brands including Asus and Intel. A search for "gma" on your favourite computer store's site should find something.
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Since gaming isn't really your focus if you're running Linux
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That might have to do with their drivers being Open Source, which has been recommended by the Linux community for a long time. According to all statements from kernel devlopers I've read, Open Source drivers are much easier to maintain.
Re:Intel Video hardware is just nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is because Intel's graphics chipsets are crippled and don't implement any of the features covered by other companies' patents which force ATI and NVidia to go closed-source.
You seem to forget that ATI had fully open-source drivers until they were forced to "go closed" due to licensing another company's IP for their chipsets. In that particular case, the first incident was S3 Texture Compression, a feature essentially required by all modern games, and apparently with patent licensing agreements that prohibit closed-source drivers. For a few months, S3TC was why Unreal Tournament 2003 (or was it 2k4?) only ran on NVidia cards under Linux - it wasn't until ATI released binary drivers that supported S3TC that UT2k3 would run on ATI cards under Linux.
The end result is that ultimately, the choice will not be Intel's as to whether to go open-source or not for full functionality, just as ATI had no choice but to "go closed" or simply leave certain critical features disabled/unsupported under Linux.
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So this is all the fault of gamers
I don't know whether to laugh, cry or punch someone in the face.
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Re:Intel Video hardware is just nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
And I should care about that why?
Intel cards are not bleeding edge. However, if all you want is a reasonably powerful, 3D supporting card for your open source desktop, then they are perfect. I don't require a huge framerate in $LATEST_GAME, because I don't play it. If I did, then an Intel card would obviously not be for me.
My intel-based graphics work perfectly, and don't give a moments trouble. I can run 3D applications if I want, and a flashy eye-candy-full desktop too. I previously had an nVidia card, and it was nothing but a fight - is my card supported with this release of the driver? Is it crashing my computer? Is it going to compile with the latest kernel?
Nowadays, I do nothing but apt-get upgrade to keep my graphics in order and I am a lot happier for it.
Not due to patents (Score:2)
You are probably confusing patents with copyrights on the submitted code.
The only way patents make code closed is when a company thinks they may be violating a patent and wants to hide it.
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As I posted in a previous reply, that is at the patent owner's discretion, even though it might not make sense.
Either way, the drivers are closed due to intellectual property licensed in such a way as to forbid implementation of some features in an open-source driver. Whatever the exact details are, it's a fact that ATI's first closed-source Linux drivers were released shortly after the UT2003 S3TC fiasco, and S3TC support (and hence UT2K3 compat
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It's simpler than that: patent applications are public, and they're supposed to describe the invention in sufficient detail to make them reproduceable. That's the entire point of a patent system. In return for giving up a trade secret, the inventor gets a limited time monopoly on production of the patented device.
Except the system is so rigged now that patents are deliberately obfuscated and often eve
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No they didn't. ATI has never developed open-source drivers. The DRI project developed open-source ATI drivers for ATI's hardware under NDA. ATI did not participate in this development.
No it is not. Epic is one of the few comp
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While the patent description is itself "open", nothing says that the licensing agreements to use that patent can't force closed source.
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However, like Andy Dodd point out there are several glaring omissions in the driver; the biggest one for me is that
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I still lament the fact that I can't get any of their current generation of video chips on a discrete card; could finally get rid of my Nvidia card without having to give up my Socket 939 motherboard and CPU.
I still have more faith in the Open Graphics proj
My money is on NVidia (Score:4, Interesting)
If anything the graphics market has gotten even more specialized since then. I don't know why they think they can succeed this time.
Re:My money is on NVidia (Score:4, Insightful)
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They could care less? It would only possible do be able to care less if you actually cared.
http://www.impleader.com/photos/blog/caringcontin
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I suppose I could care less, but I'm not sure how.
Re:My money is on NVidia (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose I could care less, but I'm not sure how.
I agree with you, and concede the point.*
*Here "I agree with you, and concede the point" is actually short for the phrase "I could agree with you, and concede the point, but I consider using words which mean the opposite of what you are trying to say in normal conversation to be extremely silly.".
Sarcasm (Score:2)
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
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That begs the question, "How can we work a begs-the-question-misuse joke into this thread?"
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Re:My money is on NVidia (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when AMD made Intel clones down to the very chip architecture and it didn't matter which manifacturer you bought from?
Remember how AMD K5 sucked and people started leaning towards Intels? And then Pentium 4 happened, and AMD's new architecture was much superior? And then Core turned things on their head again?
Things change. I don't think we're using 3DFX cards anymore either too. They used to be ahead of everyone.
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Remember when AMD made Intel clones down to the very chip architecture and it didn't matter which manifacturer you bought from?
Remember how AMD K5 sucked and people started leaning towards Intels? And then Pentium 4 happened, and AMD's new architecture was much superior? And then Core turned things on their head again?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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From a chipset standpoint, Intel actually makes decent (not spectacular, but better than many) graphics hardware already, they just don't have hardware transformation and lighting (T&L), which gets offloaded to the CPU. That means you can't be throttling your CPU(s)/cores and need a decent pipe between the hardware and memory. Intel said a couple of years back that it's a myth [intel.com] that the bottleneck is usually in
Intel is the only one... (Score:2, Interesting)
Intel has technology, has brains, has money, has plants. They can do something "as good as" the two others. Competition is a good thing (prices falling, etc); only two main actors for videocards is a bad things.
S3 can't compete. Matrox can't compete. 3dfx can't compete (they're dead). Others can't compete. Intel is our only hope.
Re:Intel is the only one... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The graphics part of S3 was sold to VIA at about the same time as it transformed to SONIC|blue. So the Chapter 11 thing is irrelevant.
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What they don't have, though, is ATI(AMD) and NVIDIA's patent portfolios.
Close... (Score:2)
If they really do this, I am sold (Score:2)
Especially if they have open source Linux drivers for the thing
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Re:If they really do this, I am sold (Score:4, Insightful)
I specifically said "Open Source"
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I wonder if this will change onboard graphics... (Score:2, Interesting)
One can always hope.
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It's also unlikely Intel boards would have a GPU slot that's not PCIe (or PCIe 2.0), since no one would buy a motherboard that locks them into only Intel. Even Crossfire/SLI boards allow you to have one of the ot
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Re:I wonder if this will change onboard graphics.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Another interesting approach (albeit not for high end machines and somewhat OT here) is AMD's plan to integrate the GPU with the CPU. That way, you might have some more choice than with a soldered in chip, and GPU cooling could profit from the availability of decent CPU coolers.
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This doesn't take up one of your expansion slots, since you already have the graphic-out ports on the motherboard in such solutions. Meaning in a small-form-factor machine, you have one more option for tweaking the system to what you want/need.
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HTX backplane is even better. (Score:2)
Or high speed task-specific coprocessors like massive vector engine for physics (Ageia's PhysX) or like fast string pattern matching for anti-virus and spam filters (Like the boards th
Intel can interface with theircpus (Score:2, Interesting)
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Then I guess Intel hasn't really tried yet because they haven't yet produced a half decent graphics chip in their history (current integrated graphics lineup *stinks* compared to ATI/NVidia integrated stuff). I don't think anyone is afraid of discrete Intel graphics cards.
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:2)
I just upgraded my sister's mobo + CPU. It had embedded graphics, so I figured it would be comparable to her 2 year old nVidia AGP card. Nope. I had to buy a new PCIe nVidia card to handle Sims 2.
On a side note: Has anyone noticed that the extremely popular family-friendly 3D games are the worst performers? Sims 2 and RCT3 both take eons to load - much slower than Q4 or HL2.
Passable. (Score:2)
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Real-time raytracing from Intel ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Real-time raytracing needs a lot of power; so, a multicore videocard is a great idea ! With raytracing, each core can compute one part of each picture. Better than SLI.
Using their knowledges, Intel can build a very fast multicore real-time raytracing videocard. It will be "something different", and it will compete with ATI and Nvidia in a new innovative way...
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Thanks but no thanks (Score:5, Funny)
But will they do DVI? (Score:2)
Re:But will they do DVI? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, in fact they aren't even going to include DSUB outputs. They are going to use modulated RF outputs like you got on the ATARI ST and AMIGA. They will be capable of displaying NTSC resolutions at anything up to 60Hz refresh rate.
What the fuck do you think?
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Creative is confident to bring the first 100,000 units to market in fall 2007. "We have already managed to find 80 SIDs," a spokesperson said, "and we're pretty sure we can get the other 99,920 ones in the next couple months."
* Sound will appear to come from
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Only problem is that I've never actually seen one.... SiL apparently make chips, and I'm sure if I went looking I could find a card, but they're not exactly common. No idea if they work under linux.
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Welcome back, Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel have already made a return of sorts to 3D with their Media Accelerator 9XX series chips you'll find in many Intel laptops. It's funny, because you'd expect an embedded chipset to be lame; lowest common denominator, shared RAM and akk. But this lappie has it and the graphics scream. It's faster than my nVidia 5700 which is two years old. The driver is stable too; never crashed. If they can do this with an embedded chipset 3d, imagine what they can do when they really put their mind to it?
nVidia and ATI have the market to themselves these days. nVidia has got pretty lax regarding driver stability for these days, and it's damned near impossible to get support out of them. They've fobbed off support to OEMs, who slap electronics onto cards and are in no position to help with driver problems. That's the sort of thing that happens when a company dominates a market.
If Intel can come out with some high performance electronics and stable drivers, well, Welcome back, Intel! I for one welcome you as my new Overlord!
Question about Intel Media Accelerator 9XX (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, I like nVidia, but if Intel is supported out-of-the-box with open source drivers, then that wor
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http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intel945gm/s b/CS-021400.htm [intel.com]
Serious gamers bitch that the 9XX series is low end. Maybe it is. But it whips my nVidia 5700 and that's good enough for me!
Here's a list
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Beryl runs quite nicely on the laptop, but I can't find a 3D game that runs decently at all.
Personally, if you want to do *any* 3D gaming at all, the 9XX doesn't seem to b
Re:Question about Intel Media Accelerator 9XX (Score:4, Informative)
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My current laptop is rated for 3/4 the battery life when fitted with an ATI X1300 GPU.
Liar! (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1821814
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2427 &p=3 [anandtech.com]
http://everythingapple.blogspot.com/2006/03/intel- gma-950-terrible-opengl.html [blogspot.com]
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For the games and graphics software I run, it's fine. The Intel game compatibility list says which games do and don't give acceptable frame rates. I said that in the first post.
Compared to the 5700, yes, hate to scare you, but it really does scream. The nVidia GeForce FX is a dog of a card. It has a very slow PixelShader implementation, and nVidia
You haven't provided any data either... (Score:2)
So, we have two opposing opinions, one with only anecdotal evidence and one with....bupkis.
Why don't you do the "uncritical and accepting" masses on Slashdot a favor and point us to some data we can use?
In fact, maybe you should, otherwise, you might start to look like the one who's "full of shit".
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If they're going to aim for the #3 slot in a market, well, they might as well not bother. Intel have the technical smarts sure. I hope they also have the business smarts too.
Driver Open Sourcing (Score:5, Interesting)
Has anyone considered that the reason ATI/NVidia won't open source their drivers/firmware is because there are blatant copyright and patent violations in their code? I'm not saying there are violations, but if there are, then I would expect each to violently defend against anyone seeing their source code. To date, the best argument heard is that access to the code would provide their competitors an unfair advantage into their optimization techniques, which most of us recognize to be hog wash. At worst [zdnet.com], they wrap it up in "we have licensed proprietary algorithms" declarations and refuse to give the community a chance to work around those algorithms.
There is only one way forward. NVidia should fund the effort to rewrite their firmware/drivers, providing only the hardware register descriptions and nuances. I'm quite sure others have asked NVidia to do this already, but Intel moving forward with this plan should force the other's hand. I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't chimed in here because for every open specification we get in the OSS world, they also get. That's where all those Microsoft drivers come from. And only on occasion is a vendor-supplied driver better that the Microsoft one. Open sourcing any drivers also helps Microsoft support more hardware out of the box, without a multitude of licensing agreements and royalty schemes.
And of course, NVidia (and now ATI) have been adding more treasure to their war chests with the PCIe motherboards. I just bought a new motherboard and it's extremely hard to find a new board with PCI-Express that doesn't have an nForce or ATI chipset.
It's going to be a tough game for Intel because it's not just graphics drivers. AMD could play into this game if they took a decisive maneuver with their GPU integration into the CPU. Remember that AMD now owns ATI.
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Yes, this has been suggested before. These violations, if they exist, may not be deliberate though.
Remember that software patents are often very broad. It is hard to write any software at all without violat
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What is NVIDIA's incentive to do this?
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Isn't typical Slashdot-think quite the opposite? I.e., Microsoft prefers closed hardware specificall
Industry Benefit (Score:2, Interesting)
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compete against a decade of experience (Score:2)
Another considerationis they may have to emulate someone elses API. Too much software out there to have a new one.
The Future of The Linux Desktop (Score:2)
If nothing else the excitement in and around the Linux community over these OpenGL possibilities
Re:Predictable... (Score:5, Funny)
Try reinstalling the drivers.
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It means that the graphics chip won't get in your way when you're setting up your motherboard, unlike some video cards I know.
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