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trimbo

Intel has something like 60% of the PC GPU market because of their built-in graphics.

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Yes, but not the high-end GPU market, which is what Intel has been trying to break into for quite some time now.

ARM is not in the high end GPU market either.

No, but Nvidia is. So if Nvidia bought ARM, they could be a CPU and GPU maker.

Nvidia has had modern ARM chips (the Tegra series among other) for at least a decade now. Any company can license ARM tech.

The top level comment was about companies owning a CPU and GPU stack. NVIDIA licenses ARM IP now, if they bought ARM they would actually own the designs, putting them on the level of AMD and Intel where they would have greater control over the technology.

Just licensing the designs puts a company on a lower chipmaking tier with Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc.

> NVIDIA licenses ARM IP now, if they bought ARM they would actually own the designs

NVIDIA Carmel is NVIDIA's own Arm v8.2-A design [0]. They only licence the architecture. The core is quite interesting, as it's doing dynamic recompilation for an underlying VLIW architecture.

However, NVIDIA Orin[1] (followup for Tegra Xavier) will use a Cortex-A78 core[2] (formerly Hercules) licenced from ARM.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

[1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-introduces-drive-a....

[2] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures...

Heh... ever since the days of the chips and technology acquisition, if not sooner, they vacillate between wanting to be in the graphics business and not being in the graphics business...

My impression was they were intentionally not competing with Nvidia at one point?

From the outside it sounds more like Intel has been infighting about this for 20+ years...

The original i740 was theoretically a capable card; although fairly hampered by being forced to use Main Memory for Textures. Intel eventually backed down from the graphics market back then, and instead continued to use the 740 as a basis for the integrated graphics in the i810/815 chipsets.

But, as GPUs became closer to what we saw as real GPUs, Intel continued to press on with the idea that keeping things done in the CPU was better for them (i.e. encouraging upgrades to higher end CPUs vs selling more lower margin graphics cards.)

You saw a similar pattern with the 845/855/865: Shaders were all done in software (Hey, it finally almost justified Netburst, right? ;)

And this pattern seems to continue with various forms of infighting between groups up to this day.

The other Consistent problem they have had is driver compatibility/capability.

Also, the i740 drivers were really bad. I had one and I remember all kind of bug and graphical glitchs on games that worked fine on a GeFoce 2 MX that I got latter.

Aren't AMD's APU's a better product for that market and will replace intel sooner or later?

One difference is that AMD only offers integrated graphics with weak CPUs, while Intel, unless something's changed recently, offers them on all their consumer models.

Intel has started offering "F" SKU processors without integrated graphics only very recently with 9th and 10th gen Core CPU's.

But yes otherwise, nearly every Intel CPU has integrated graphics whereas only a few select AMD CPU's have integrated graphics (and AMD brands them as APU's not CPU's).

I'd be okay with only a few select CPUs, if even one of them was a reasonably powerful one. Instead, it's only the bottom of the barrel CPUs performance-wise.

It seems that is changing somewhat with the 4000-series APUs, but guess what, those are only going to be sold to OEMs, not individuals.

It's all rather frustrating, since I'm still on an i7-4770k and wouldn't mind an upgrade.

So your situation is you want to DIY build a desktop with an integrated CPU+GPU, with a significant upgrade from a 4770k.

4770k passmark: 7042 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4770K...

Ryzen 5 3400G passmark: 9421 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+3400G&i...

Intel Graphics 4600 (in 4770k): 649 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+HD+4600...

RX Vega 11 (in 3400G): 2106 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+RX+Veg...

So relative to 4770k, 3400G has a 33% faster CPU, and 3.25x the GPU.

> 3400G has a 33% faster CPU

Right. That's not a significant upgrade IMO. I'm not even sure it would be worth it if it merely required a CPU swap. Since it actually requires a new motherboard, it's not even close to worth it.

A real upgrade would be to a 3900X (passmark: 32861), or at the very last, a 3600 (passmark: 17828). But those require a discrete GPU.

The 4700G looks like it would more or less suffice (passmark: unknown, ~18k?) , but it won't be sold to individuals, only OEMs.

> 3.25x the GPU.

As far as I can tell, I've never run into any limits of the 4770K's iGPU, so I don't think this matters. Running dual 1920x1200 monitors.

It would also let you upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 and ~double your memory bandwidth. But if you wait another year or two, you could jump right to a DDR5 system :)

Good point. Plus, of course, NVMe.

Maybe I should review AMD's GPU offerings again. Do you happen to know anything about this? Last time I was looking for (fanless + dirt cheap + dual display), and couldn't find anything that fit all 3. However... I didn't ask the question, does the fan run all the time, or only under heavy load?

Also, with lots of games reportedly working on Linux these days, maybe I should replace "dirt cheap" with "reasonably cheap."

AMD bet on APUs more than a decade ago, hoping to grab the market with better GPUs than Intel, and have been offering a better product about as long.

But the reality is that vast majority of business desktops and laptop don't need anything better than what Intel offers.

If AMD gains share in that segment (and it looks like they are), it will IMO be because of finally having a better CPU, not because of a better GPU.

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