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Comment by kcb | Hacker News Reader

Love that these include a basic igpu. Makes them much more viable for home server and low end desktops(when eventually discounted).

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This makes these machines a lot more viable in the business and engineering world as well where CPU performance is desired but graphics is not. I've seen in the past AMD Zen machines paired with say a GT710 simply because it was the cheapest GPU option available that would allow for basic apps and drive two screens.

What a coincidence, that was my setup as well but for my next(now current) pc, I changed it to a Radeon R7 250, (nvidia is fine but dealing with the drivers on linux was a pain in the neck)

Yeah the commercial installs I've seen with Zen and GT710 are for Windows. For Linux an AMD R7 240 or 430 is the typical choice.

I am developer and this is my exact work setup

I personally suspect that the true reason for that integrated GPU is the USB4 support. Always having that integrated GPU allows for full USB4 directly on the motherboard without needing hacks like looping a DisplayPort cable from the discrete GPU to the motherboard. And I believe it's possible to render in one GPU but present the output through another GPU, so you could in theory even use a discrete GPU for rendering while the output is going through the USB4 socket on the motherboard, without any extra cables between the graphics card and the motherboard.

Too bad AMD doesn't seem to be doing well with USB4 so far. And with a "basic" motherboard now priced at $125 I'd rather skip it anyway.

Probably they will come down soon, imho.

I had a quick look at x670 motherboards and the only usb4 support I could see is via addin cards with that hacky displayport in setup.

Yeah, but Intel has the advantage of providing vGPU support for their integrated graphics. I don't think there is anything really stopping AMD but wanting money.

Intel barely supports this anymore to me, and their SRIOV support has not been publicized anywhere from what I can see beyond a commit on GitHub. Furthermore, they are not including this on Arc dGPUs from my understanding, so I imagine Intel is moving this to datacentre GPUs only as well.

It used to be documented really well and Arch has a good entry about it too:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_GVT-g

Not sure if you were thinking of something else, but both NVIDIA and AMD could really approve in this regard. There is no reason to limit sharing your GPU across VMS except to primarily limit platforms.

I'm not talking about GVT-g, which isn't used on newer Intel GPUs.

That is a shame. It looks like the source repo needs support, but sad that they haven't maintained it that well.

Unfortunately it is quite difficult to build a power-efficient home server as the power consumption of many components is not clear. Take the motherboard for instance, you really have no idea how much is consumed by it. It is reasonable clear for the CPU, but for many other components it is not.

I hope they also make more advanced models with regular GPUs. I have a 4300GE which runs fine non trivial games from just a few years ago (Far Cry 5, Prey 2017, etc) under Linux+WINE, and its quite low 35W TDP makes it a really nice CPU for home/office use with occasional non high end gaming.

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