The linked Ars Technica article says it well, "who will benefit enough from an Xe Max-equipped laptop"? I don't see anyone.
1. Discrete GPU sells, Discrete = better than Integrated. ( Forget about the actual benchmark for the time being ) Especially true in market like China.
2. I would not be surprised if this was giving out for free with or for very little cost compared to just buying TigerLake. ( Or you know, normal price but with Intel Xe Max Marketing budget rebate )
3. The sole purpose is likely a Marketing exercise to address the world / market. We ( Intel ) now have a discrete GPU too. And they are good. ( You will always need to solve the Chicken and Egg problem with continue investment of GPU, revenue generation and demand for a product new to market segment)
4. Nearly 80% of PC sold are now Laptops. You need something to generate volume, view, exposures, Xe Max seems like well positioned.
5. You also need product volume to push developers to develop for their GPU / OneAPI. Just like Apple tells you e.g 60% of Active Devices, or 600M are already on iOS 14. Developer should plan their App upgrade with new API usage accordingly. Same with OneAPI and Intel Xe Max GPU. It is easier if you have a Total Addressable Market.
Q: So this is more or a marketing move than anything?
A: Possibly, Intel are exceptionally good at sales and marketing. Despite their Technological incompetence in the past years, I have to give them credit for that.
I think this hits the nail on the head.
It feels like, at best, a 'pipe cleaner' (i.e. a product that's put through the whole process to debug it and ensure that a later product goes smoothly).
The same goes for AVX512. It seems niche but then you use it and it’s great, but only a weird subset of laptops have it for now (but MBA 2020 and MBP 13 2020 do have it, MBP 16 doesn’t)
I feel like Hip, OneAPI, ISPC, etc. haven't improved anything over CUDA.
With CUDA we had one proprietary API. Now we have 3-4.
I agree that OpenCL should have won but OTOH most of us have AVX2 or NEON to work with at least and things like ISPC make that trivial to write for, for the workloads where it matters.
Yes, intel's GPUs can handle that on paper, but they can't really do so while running any software which needs GPU acceleration, such as a browser. It's laggy at best.
For Linux, I don't know, the only older machine with Linux that I have is Ivy Bridge one, and that is capable only of 4k@30, which is uncomfortable. With Kaby Lake, it's nice.
Also, lag is a latency. That would suggest, that your problem is somewhere else, not in the raw GPU performance. GPU itself doesn't have anything with the output resolution anyway, it is handled separate, dedicated block called output encoder.
IMO if you're just going to run a VT and scale everything back up both compositing and 4k cause way more problems than they're worth. Give me tearing, pixels, and unupdated danged regions any day over input latency.
If you are that sensitive to input latency, run your terminal full screen. In full screen mode most compositors skip the compositing step, as there would be nothing to compose with. So in this case, your single, full screen window does direct scan out.
macbook pro's if they keep their intel based cpus. if you use an external monitor it will always use the discrete gpu, besides that it might not be necessary. the discrete gpu inside the macbook pros heat really fast. it really depends on how good these are and how much heat they produce. if they are slightly worse but have way better cooling than its a win-win