Intel GMA HD - thoughts on use in MBA?

[iDisk]

Thanks buddy for chiming in with some voice of reason here, because this thread has sadly become overpopulated with very vocal proponents of whatever junk intel dishes at us, with their critical faculties in judging intel highly diminished.

I personally haven't forgotten about the Larrabee fiasco, the igpu turned software framework, aka vapourware.

And just to add to what's been said above, I too would love it if apple could add a discrete option and turn off the intel igfx, or at least have it switch on on the most basic tasks. Unfortunately the air is incredibly thin, and while I see them being able to offer such an option in macbooks and pros I really can't see how they ll fit one in the air. But even if they do we will have to wait for an incubation period to see if this actually works thermal's wise, because gen A, despite working in the labs and on paper, was a far cry from managing the thermals well. Again, due to the intel igfx.

The air is probably the most beautiful laptop on the market at the moment, let's see what apple can figure out to make up for intel's fast one.

Thanks for the kind words ....... Yeah if they turn off intel gpu I can live with that. Plus the reason Apple moved to Nvidia to begin with was for the OPEN CL (WHICH THEY SERIOUSLY INVESTED IN) And GCD another heavy investment...I think scottsdale said it "do we really think Steve would throw all that R&D down the tube, for crappy intel graphics!?" no way jose ....

The Air is also what the rest of apple notebooks will look like at some point down the road. Steve Jobs & Johnny Ive love minimalism and simplicity and the MacBook Air is that. So expect more things to come with this beautiful notebook

 

[applesupergeek]

Thanks for the kind words ....... Yeah if they turn off intel gpu I can live with that. Plus the reason Apple moved to Nvidia to begin with was for the OPEN CL (WHICH THEY SERIOUSLY INVESTED IN) And GCD another heavy investment...I think scottsdale said it "do we really think Steve would throw all that R&D down the tube, for crappy intel graphics!?" no way jose ....

The Air is also what the rest of apple notebooks will look like at some point down the road. Steve Jobs & Johnny Ive love minimalism and simplicity and the MacBook Air is that. So expect more things to come with this beautiful notebook

I do expect that too, the slimming and converging of the notebooks to the air prototype, but it will take time.

As for open cl, well said, again, I missed that again amongst all this madness going on in this thread, despite being the first one to probably mention it in the forums wrt the igfx from intel, in the waiting for arrandale thread. And when I did say that they were actually people who had the gal to profess that the intel's igfx would be open cl capable - or that open cl was a matter of firmware implementation. Even three year old ati and nvidia models are not open cl capable...

 

[Eidorian]

Even three year old ati and nvidia models are not open cl capable...

You need to go further than that.

 

[ayeying]

Even three year old ati and nvidia models are not open cl capable...

The 8600GT was released in 2007... its 2010... its 3 years old... it's OpenCL capable...

 

[Anonymous Freak]

And when I did say that they were actually people who had the gal to profess that the intel's igfx would be open cl capable - or that open cl was a matter of firmware implementation.

I was one of the ones who had the "gall" to suggest that Arrandale may be OpenCL capable. It was based on an article at Guru 3D. Re-reading that article, it appears that I was mis-remembering, and equating "GPGPU" with "OpenCL", even though OpenCL isn't directly mentioned. And there was no "[having] the gall to profess", there was simple statement of something I had read. Just because I am (apparently mis-)quoting someone else does not mean that I am part of a vast "force Apple to use Intel graphics" conspiracy...

Although, to be honest, based on many of the replies in this thread, I now expect someone to decry that Guru 3D must be a shill of Intel, being paid off to up-sell Intel graphics.....

 

[applesupergeek]

You need to go further than that.

My bad, make this 4-5 years to be on the safe side, which stresses my point even more that you have to go that long back, to find non open cl gpus from the other major two, while intel hasn't still caught on in all those years.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

My bad, make this 4-5 years to be on the safe side, which stresses my point even more that you have to go that long back, to find non open cl gpus from the other major two, while intel hasn't still caught on in all those years.

The simple answer is because Intel would rather sell you a faster CPU than have you offload anything to the GPU.

The complex answer is because Intel has made very few graphics units that are capable of doing any non-graphics work on the graphics unit itself. Pretty much, only the 'X'-series chips.

The GMA950 in the original integrated-equipped Macs isn't capable of hardware-anything. It is barely more than just a glorified frame-buffer with fancy drivers that use the CPU to do work that should happen in GPU; but convincing the OS that they're happening in GPU. (This is a gross oversimplification, even the GMA950 does have some hardware processing going on, such as pixel shaders.)

The next GMA3100 wasn't much more than a slightly-beefed-up GMA950. The X3100, though, has 'real' hardware T&L unit onboard, as well as vertex shading.

The latest pre-Arrandale, GMA X4500, is again, just a beefed up X3100. Much more, especially video processing, can be done on-unit. The 4000-series was also available with non-X versions, so in the lower-end desktop 4-series chipsets, you still don't get real hardware T&L or vertex shaders. (The drivers claim it's available, but then have the host CPU do the actual work.)

The Arrandale (and Clarkdale on the desktop) are even more beefed-up versions of X4500. More execution units, more addressable memory, (potentially, depending on model,) faster execution core.