Skylake’s graphics architecture: Intel is still gunning for dedicated GPUs | Hacker News Reader

Skylake’s graphics architecture: Intel is still gunning for dedicated GPUs

arstechnica.com

Good news for me. Recently, after some reflection on the causes of most of my frustrations with both laptops and desktops over the last decade or so, I've decided to give up on AMD and Nvidia for now. #1 source of all frustrations, hardware-wise. I'd rather put up with being a bit out of date on gaming than keep messing with them. Cheaper that way, too. And it's not like AMD's competitive anymore[1] so I'm going to be buying Intel anyway.

Dedicated graphics cards: awful under Windows, even worse under Linux, seemingly the cause of all the worst problems in laptops (even Apple). Intel graphics it is, for lack of another option that doesn't suck.

[1] :-(

holy moly how times have changed. a few years ago such an opinion was objectively unthinkable.

Don't count AMD completely out yet. Zen could still be good next year. I hope. Completely redesigned architecture! Please AMD?

I don't know why a non-gamer would bother with an AMD/NVIDIA graphics card. Even a developer. If the most graphically intensive thing you do is watch YouTube videos or Netflix, use the Intel integrated video. It's plenty good for those things. I totally agree with you there.

But on the flip side, as a gamer, I couldn't imagine giving up my discrete graphics cards on my gaming desktop. How many years back and how low resolution and graphics settings do you have to go before you find a game which is playable on an integrated chip? I guess it depends a lot on your definition of "playable", and your game selection; if GOG is where you regularly buy games then the integrated chip is probably more than adequate. Or if you're using a single 800x600 monitor, you're probably ready to run the latest games on your integrated chip. But otherwise, I can't seriously recommend anyone play games on an integrated video chip.

Sidenote: I would choose the touchpad as my #1 source of hardware frustration. Anecdotally, I haven't had much issue with graphics cards, other than one replaced under warranty.

Some people do OpenCL / CUDA work as GPUs do some things exponentially faster than CPUs do. Nvidia pretty much beat everyone in this game, including Intel, with the Phi.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5...

44fps in Bioshock Infinite on Medium at 1080p using Iris Pro 6200 graphics.

Also runs on a console from seven Moore's Law doublings ago, 720p@30. Though maybe not at the equivalent of medium?

Yeah, integrated graphics are still just pretty much good enough for those interested in playing some games once in a while; anyone expecting serious gaming performance even on the highest end chip is going to be disappointed. On the plus side, you can get a ton of firepower for $200 these days, which is pretty low given inflation and what GPUs cost in the 90s.

What frustrations are you talking about?

I'm a pretty heavy gamer and I would never do without a dedicated GPU.

For me the most exciting thing about Skylake GPUs is its support of GVT-g which will allow the GPU to be shared with up to 4 VMs. This will avoid dealing altogether with nVidia shenanigans for PCI passthrough.

The disappointing thing is that they will require firmware binary blobs [1]. Although while it opens an attack surface, in principle it should be limited to the own hardware, so not much of a problem. (There are bigger problems like Intel ME).

But it's the drivers what matters the most. Which I hope they keep releasing as open source.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=intel-skl...

Freed of the bandwidth bottleneck by eDRAM, Iris Pro actually matches lower-mid range dedicated GPUs: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5....

I only have Iris Pro in my Retina Macbook Pro from late-2013, and it works so great! Never missed having a dedicated graphics card, and I can even do casual gaming in WC3 / CS1.6 / CS:GO / Half-Life 2.

Surely we have to set higher goals to aim for with integrated graphics than 12 year old games.

Haha! I totally agree! It's just me stuck in the past. However, I think we've come long regarding integrated graphics. Running newer games like CS:GO on high graphics, even though it's not the greatest game regarding graphics, I think is pretty solid from an integrated GPU.

If just Intel can manage to match 1.5-2 year old Nvidia GPU's from the date of release, I think it's really good!

If those goals are still games, then no. I never understood the push to ever increasing CPU/GPU demands from AAA games.

It's like they gave up completely on gameplay and substance, and it's all about BS polygons.

I'm glad Intel are addressing the weakness of integrated graphics, I personally believe PC gaming has tons of potential to grow, as long as you can play a good chunk of new games on integrated graphics (not at the highest resolutions of course, but where it's still possible to play competitively).

As an aside, this won't help me, I'm never buying Intel again, not until they remove the AMT feature.

Never heard of anybody having an issue with AMT/vPro.

you can disable it in the BIOS. It's a CPU feature meant for sysadmins, it's not like it enables access for intel. (although it could.. in theory).

what's your issue with AMT? (also, not all chips have it).

> "you can disable it in the BIOS. It's a CPU feature meant for sysadmins, it's not like it enables access for intel. (although it could.. in theory)."

Call me paranoid if you want, but I think the recent Windows 10 privacy debacle shows that even if you disable something, doesn't mean it's actually disabled.

> "what's your issue with AMT? (also, not all chips have it)."

My issue with AMT is one of security. I don't believe there won't be an exploit in the future, it's not out of the question, some versions of it have already been exploited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

AMT has full remote access to your computer, beyond OS control or visibility, and can be utilised even when the computer is in a powered off state (still needs to be connected to a power source and connected to a network of course). The risks are huge! I'd rather choose a competitor that doesn't have it.

Which Intel CPUs don't have AMT?

well, it's a case by case basis, but my desktop has this processor: http://ark.intel.com/products/77780/Intel-Core-i7-4930K

which does not have it

but my laptops both have it.. :\

http://ark.intel.com/products/43559/Intel-Core-i7-620LM

http://ark.intel.com/products/53464/Intel-Core-i7-2640M

It actually resides in the pch. The processor is called the management engine. In newer platforms, it gets to decide if the processor even gets to see the bios executable code.

All modern Intel chips have the dedicated, non-user-controlled management processor used for AMT/vPro whether they support the feature or not, and you can't disable it - the BIOS option just passes a flag to the code running on the management processor asking it nicely not to give anyone remote access to your PC. The area of Flash it boots from is even read-protected so you have no way of knowing what code it's actually running short of sticking the Flash chip in an external programmer.

Edit: Also, apparently at least some version allow remote provisioning of AMT with no user intervention even with it disabled in the BIOS. You need an expensive SSL certificate, but that'd be no obstacle for attackers like Hacking Team or the NSA. See http://people.kth.se/~maguire/DEGREE-PROJECT-REPORTS/100402-...

What do you use for a decent non-intel laptop?

I don't own a laptop at the moment (I only have a phone and an MP3 player), but if I did I'd probably go for a 64bit AMD APU-based machine or a ARM-based Chromebook with Linux or BSD (and fit a larger SSD).

Integrated graphics always seem like a bad deal. There worse than a cheap aka ~50$ graphics card and take up a lot of silicon on expensive CPU's.

If you go by transistor count it's easy to be spending well over 100$ for a terrible GPU which is then disabled. Honestly, if Intel where not effectively a monopoly there is no way they could get away with this crap.

PS: Due to issues with latency and sharing RAM bandwidth integrated graphics are always going to be a relatively bad deal.

Only because of the way they are currently implemented on PC. Both current-gen consoles for example use integrated graphics to great effect, but they are engineered around them with high-bandwidth memory (GDDR5 or eSRAM), as opposed to the after-thought they usually are on PC.

IMO, if you use dedicated GDDR5 ram it stops being integrated graphics. Granted, I can see the argument, but there are still issues with things like heat dissipation outside of low powered devices like a cellphone.

Iris Pro uses high-bandwidth eDRAM.

Haswell (Iris Pro) has 128MB of eDRAM on chip enabling it to do some benchmarks and games reasonably well. But, even low end (50$) GPU's have 1GB of DDR5.

So, it's yet another huge compromise. Granted, having huge amounts of L4 cache could in theory be very useful when you disable the graphics. Which they might do, I don't know a lot about Iris.

The current-gen consoles are effectively mid-range dedicated GPUs with a CPU integrated in terms of stuff like die area[1], compute and raster/pixel units, memory bandwidth, etc, and even then performance isn't exactly something to write home about.

[1] Compare http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2013/11/21/sony-ps4-ap... to the die shots in this article, for example.

It's still much better than anything integrated in the PC space.

DX12 adds support for pipelining across every GPU on a machine, potentially lighting up that "disabled silicon". This may be a value add enough reason for Intel to keep innovating its integrated graphics processing.

Is it fully documented so we can write open source drivers for it?

Yes, here's the Phoronix performance benchmark for the open source graphics:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-hd-...

In general Intel has been very good on open source graphics, they don't have a proprietary driver for Linux at all. However you'll need to pass in an argument to the kernel to enable any sort of good performance until at least the 4.3 kernel.

They also provide a good amount of documentation for the hardware.

https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware-specific...

The documentation isn't released yet (it usually trails the hardware release by a few months) but when it is available it will be located on the website of Intel's Open Source Technology Center: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware-specific...

And, my team at Intel is writing drivers for it as part of the Mesa project (http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net)

Thanks for chiming in! Will you please relay our wishes to the powers that be -- that the GPU driver stay blob-free?

And thanks for contributing the drivers to Mesa!

The only important question: can I finally run Minecraft?

Minecraft runs great on HD4000 integrated graphics.

Define great? 1600x1200 60fps?

1920x1080, not sure about the fps, certainly over 30, possibly 60. No crazy texture packs or anything, but it runs well. Can also run games like Civ 5, Trine 2, and Valve games quite well - albeit not with maxed out graphics. KSP has some issues (probably a Unity thing), but runs good on lower settings.

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