Hacker News Reader

Comment by banana_giraffe | Hacker News Reader

The response from Intel seems to be betting on the Evo platform [1], with third parties announcing laptops like the XPG Xenia XE

1 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/evo.ht...

View on HN

You have to read between the lines here. They make no claims about CPU performance - just integrated GPU performance from Xe (which is a big improvement from previous Iris GPUs.) Then they claim battery life (9 hours, FHD, 250-nits, etc.)

What that means is laptop OEMs will have to limit TDP on CPUs - probably 15W or less. Given current Intel chips being very power hungry, these are likely NOT going to be great CPU performers.

The only competition in CPU space to M1 will be Ryzen 5000U chips in the 15-25W thermal envelope. They should be ~19% more powerful/efficient than Ryzen 4000U chips, but I would not expect M1 levels of cool or battery life yet.

> Ryzen 5000U

Am I right to assume we can see benchmarks within the next few weeks?

Some laptops seem to be on sale now, and others were targeting January 26 as the release date. That being said, I do not know if there's an NDA from AMD or if all variations of the chips (i.e. H, U, HX, etc) will be available this month or over time in the next few months.

So I think there's a good chance in the next week or so we'll start seeing benchmarks.

So they're announcing a "platform". Smacks of managerial bottom-covering. Almost like forming a committee to investigate the problem.

- where was this 1/2/10 years ago?

- how would this address the fundamental CPU performance gap?

- Intel has no competitive GPU offering, yet another glaring failure on their part

- why would OEMs go along with this when Ryzen is a better CPU, GPU, aside from getting Intel bribes and the usual marketplace branding momentum?

- will this actually get ports migrated to laptops faster? It was criminal how long it took for HDMI 2.0 to hit laptops.

I get Intel doesn't own the stack/vertical integration, but Intel could have devoted 1% of its revenue to a kickass Linux OS to keep Microsoft honest a long time ago and demonstrate its full hardware.

Even if only coders/techies used it like Macbooks are standard issue in the Bay, it would have been good insurance, leverage, or demoware.

"I get Intel doesn't own the stack/vertical integration, but Intel could have devoted 1% of its revenue to a kickass Linux OS to keep Microsoft honest a long time ago and demonstrate its full hardware." Interesting point.. makes one wonder why didn't they do it while having a mountain of cash.

They do have something – Clear Linux [0]. Definitely not too mcuh investment, but they do differentiate by compiling packages for much newer instruction sets compared to other distros.

[0]: https://clearlinux.org/

The real differentiator would have been an army of good driver coders and contributors to KDE/GnomeX.

Actually Intel has small army of Linux driver developers. Last time I counted in git logs there was around 100 of developers who one way or another contributed to Linux graphics stack: kernel drivers, Xorg, Mesa, etc. We can't really know how many people are working behind the scenes.

Yeah of course it was possible for Intel to do more, but they're clearly largest contributor to Linux graphics stack anyway.

They were so in bed with Microsoft.

Microsoft being a true monopoly might have struck fear in the timid souls of Intel executives that they would go headlong for AMD.

Or Google had this opportunity for years, and half-assed ChromeOS. Or AMD. Or Dell/HP/IBM who sold enough x86 to have money on the side.

I don't buy that it would have been hard. Look at what Apple did with OSX with such a paltry market share and way before the iPhone money train came. First consumer OSX release was 2001.

Sure, Apple had a massive advantage by buying NeXT's remnants and Jobs's familiarity with it and the people behind it, but remember that Apple's first choice was BeOS.

So anyone looking to push things could have got BeOS, or an army of Sun people as Sun killed off Solaris. The talent was out there.

Instead here we sit with Windows in a perpetual state of the two-desktop tiled/old frankenstein, Linux DE balkanization and perpetual reinvention/rewrite from scratch, and OSX locked on Apple.

They had Intel Clear Linux, a server-oriented distro. Quite good at what it targeted.

Intel Clear Linux still exists and is still developed by Intel.

>- where was this 1/2/10 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino#Notebook_implementati...

Yeah, on top of it all, given all of the shots of the reference models look vaguely like a Mac Book, it really feels to me like Intel dug around in their couch cushions to come up with a response.

> I get Intel doesn't own the stack/vertical integration, but Intel could have devoted 1% of its revenue to a kickass Linux OS to keep Microsoft honest a long time ago and demonstrate its full hardware.

Moblin, MeeGo.

That looks more like ultrabooks but not watered down again - I'm not impressed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com