The cooling advantage that CPU integrated graphics has

The article seems to imply that iGPUs are more efficient. This is kind of true, but mostly because they have to be, because they need to share the capabilities of their cooler. Most CPUs and GPUs nowadays are clocked for max performance, not efficiency. Pulling them back just a little bit from the red-line and their efficiency skyrockets, but does the user want to pay more for less?

The downside of dGPUs nowadays is that the PCIe form factor was not designed for triple+ slot 10 kg AIBs. Jostle an assembled computer with a RTX 4090 in it and you're probably lucky that it doesn't rip the PCIe connector off the motherboard. This could be made into a cooling argument by pointing out that (consumer) cases just blow the heat around, and don't really exhaust it. (GPUs for servers have passive heatsinks that have front-to-back channels that the jet-engine server fans blow straight through).

Integrated graphics onboard the CPU's eviscerated the sales of "low end graphics cards" to the point that few to no makers are building and selling "low end cards" because there simply is no market left for basic graphics cards.

For the user that is satisfied with their integrated graphics, they have no reason at all to buy a separate card, and for the users who do want a separate card, most want the high power GPU cards, not a card that is little more than the onboard GPU but on a plug in card.

It is the same reason why parallel/serial I/O cards disappeared (when most motherboards began integrating onboard parallel/serial ports, sales of standalone cards would have collapsed) or sound cards (same reason, if onboard is "good enough", no additional sale of a separate card occurs).

A compiler targeting the M[1|2|3] processors, for instance, can always rely on having the GPU (and NPU, and video engine, and so on) to offload work, the same way we can now almost rely on any x86 having AVX available.

It’d be interesting to see what an OS that could deal with multiple processors of different instruction sets sharing the same memory image would look like from a user’s perspective.

> These days these cards are mostly extinct

Precisely. It's really hard to find a GPU that is passively cooled and typically GPUs have fans that are ultra-noisy when under load.

I had an AMD 3700X CPU (no iGPU on that one) and I really didn't like it.

So one year ago I built myself a little rig: AMD 7700X CPU, Be Quiet! tower, Noctua fan, 32 GB of DDR5 and that series of CPU does have an iGPU. I put it in eco mode (I think at peak it'll draw 95W instead of 105W: no discernible difference which I tested with, for example, compiling the Linux kernel or compiling Emacs) in the UEFI/BIOS and when I use it it's often running in powersaving mode (for example when I switch to a browser, the CPU automatically goes to powersaving mode but if I switch to Emacs or an IDE, it goes to performance mode).

The thing is exceptionally quiet. When it's compiling on all cores I can slightly hear the CPU's fan (a Noctua one) ramping up and that's how I like it: it's very muffled, very subtle, but I can hear it. When I do something else than compiling, it's inaudible.

If you want a really quiet desktop and don't game, a CPU with an iGPU is the way to go IMO.

The answer is twofold:

- AMD and Nvidia are charging through the nose for small die graphics cards. Mostly because they can.

- They are also clocking them to the stratosphere, in an extremely inefficient power band where dropping performance ~15% would massively cut power.

There are other factors like drastically changing silicon scaling and capital costs, and better IGPs obsoleting really small GPUs, but those are the big ones.

If you are the writer, you should keep an eye out for AMD Strix Halo, which could put your cooling assertions to the test. Technically the Mezzanine GPU cards (and the actual MI300A CPU) you see in servers use CPU-like heatsinks as well.

  Another limit, now that I look, is the amount of power available to a PCIe card

In my recent experience on an Intel z790/i7-14700K system, getting a signal during boot (e.g., when you want to go into BIOS) was not reliable (usually worked, but sometimes not). When connected to a portable 1280x720 monitor I use when setting up systems, parts of the BIOS screens were a garbled mess. Plugging in a discrete GPU fixed that.

I've also encountered weirdness on the same system where I couldn't disable secure boot until I booted from a discrete GPU (and then after that, on iGPU, I could enable/disable at will). Plus CSM is not an option when booting from certain Intel iGPUs: https://www.asus.com/me-en/support/FAQ/1045467/

Or even better, with AMD APUs 4 years ago, if you used a discrete Radeon GPU instead, you'd lose sound over HDMI: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/d5emmk/agesa_bug_no_so...

Don’t think even DDR5 gets anywhere close to gddr6x on dedicated GPUs. Plus gpu side ram tech is due for a refresh soon too - it’s been on gddr6x for a while

Unfortunately physics is merciless, ANY really interest GPU, MUST have significant consumption, even if it is some moderate level player. Real numbers, ~15..25W for moderate modern GPU, even without considering other disadvantages, like high RAM bandwidth requirement (and sure, usage).

If you talking about low end CPU, for them 45W TDP usually already a lot, and unfortunately, this is not include iGPU consumption.

Even for top CPUs, where normal 65..150W, additional 25W is significant.

For example, I tested things on now considered old, core i7-7700, which claimed 65W TDP, and it's iGPU, which is around 1/10 of old nvidia 1060, consume ~15W, and these numbers looking plausible, as nvidia 1060 claimed consumption 120W.

What all that mean, real TDP of core i7-7700, when high iGPU usage, far exceeding claimed 65W (easy to calculate, 65W + 15W = 80W).

Unfortunately, I have not equipment to make accurate enough measurements, and not existing any reliable source of such measurements, but from open approximations, and rumors, and experience, I could say, when use iGPU only for trivial office graphics (HN page and some text blogs), and limit CPU freq to official 3.6GHz, looks like it really spent 65W and official boxed cooler is enough.

When I tried to use TurboBoost, also official 4.2GHz, and run intensive for iGPU graphics (or some GPU math), in about minute got throttle. Rumors said, i7 more then doubles it's consumption in TurboBoost, so need much more powerful cooler, considered ~150W, much more than claimed 65W.

But with better iGPU, really added consumption will be 45..80W (considering, iGPU usually using more energy effective tech than discrete GPU). I don't think, you will be happy, even if CPU alone TDP around 250..300W.

Sure, these all disadvantages, are not end of world, but hard to name them advantage..

Discrete GPUs have a thermal advantage, because they don't have to share heat-sinking capacity with the CPU.. My Graphics card certainly spews out _A_LOT_ more heated air than the CPU, and on full load, the entire system is practically a space-heater.. Having more physical room for heat-sinking is an advantage in this scenario.

I see the same advantage with power. A PCIe card can more or less ignore the supply from the socket and decide how many various molex plugs they need. There's already dedicated PCIe plugs, and nothing prevents the addition of more, except physical space on the wide edge of the card, the capacity of PSUs and the physical challenges of transporting 99.manynines of that power away as heat.

I like passive computers, in a pretty with reduced lifespan sort of sense, and a separate GPU is a definite nuisance to cool passively.

What? Surely it is discrete graphics cards which have the most sophisticated cooling systems, since they consume the most power.

> [...] the amount of power available to a PCIe card, especially one that uses fewer than 16 PCIe lanes; apparently a x4 or x8 card may be limited to 25W total

Maybe through the PCIe connector that is true, but discrete graphics cards have dedicated power connections.