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Comment by digi_owl | Hacker News Reader

One should also note that the x86 platform has taken on some SoC like structures over the years, with AMD as a driving force.

For example they lumped the memory controller onto the CPU die with the Athlon 64, and then a GPU on their A series.

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Also, as the author missed, Haswell now integrates power regulation on the CPU.

Which evidently was a mistake, because it's been dropped with Skylake.

Yeah, and the integrated GPUs, at least the entry level ones, do suck. My Acer netbook is barely able to play 360p videos, 720p if you're lucky and 1080p - no hope. My cheap smartphone can play 1080p without a single dropped frame.

I suspect that could be a driver/software issue.

On neither of those platforms is the GPU doing the video decode. On your phone there's a dedicated DSP. On your netbook the CPU is pulling up the slack. There's a lot of serial work in decoding videos (like huffman decoding) that doesn't translate to standard GPUs without a little extra silicon.

An entry level AMD apu will give you a dedicated video decoding unit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobcat_%28microarchitecture%29

I've never had an APU but on paper they sound really nice. Intel probably has similar but you may have to be more careful picking your CPU because of market feature segregation.

AMD tends to dominate the GPU half of the APU battle. Intel has made great strides, and I'm interested in their newest pieces, but from what I've seen so far, AMD still wins this niche.

One of them should just rip off and modernize the SGI Onyx or Octane approaches. They did amazing stuff with 150-200Mhz CPU's by great, HW architecture. :)

There's something seriously wrong with your install to not be able to play 360p videos. Really

I would check video drivers, DMA enabled on drives, excess ram or cpu usage by another process(es)

My 7 year old notebook (the one I retired already) had absolutely no problem with videos of this size.

The problem with the 360p videos is that Chrome eats up RAM like I drink beer, and add the neccessities of the Windows world like anti-malware software, adblockers, crappy 3G stick software... you get it :/

I'm guessing YouTube is using VP9 on your netbook which is probably decoded on the CPU because most GPUs don't do VP9 decoding yet. On your smartphone it's probably h264 that's being decoded on the GPU. You can try the h264ify extension[1] to force h264 on your netbook.

[1] https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

On the other hand, my higher end, but certainly not highest Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon E3-1225 V2 (3.2/3.6GHz turbo) plays 1080p without a glitch using Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu Trusty. I'm sure I wouldn't want to play an intense 3D game with it, but for 2D purposes it's great and relatively cheap with all the integration in the chip, the Supermicro X9SAE-O it's on has a real paucity of additional chips, and one of those is for a not strictly needed 2nd gigabit Ethernet port (for a workstation board like it, most useful for running older systems software instead of depending on the southbridge's integrated controller).

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