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Comment by justinph | Hacker News Reader

AKA: The chip that will finally let you buy a retina Macbook Air.

If the GPU is fast enough to drive a retina display.

Well the current gen Haswell can drive a 4K display, and the Anandtech article suggested this GPU was the same but 'better' (more efficient and feature parity with DirectX 11_2) so I would guess that it can drive a retina display (which is nominally a 2K display on a 13" laptop)

But being able to attach a 4K monitor doesn't necessarily mean it can scroll a window at 60 fps.

Why wouldn't it be?

The Macbook Pro Retinas already use the onboard Intel GPUs on all but the highest-end models, and they'll only be more powerful with Broadwell I suspect.

Even the "hd graphics" or low end Kaveri GPUs from AMD can drive 4k.

Hell, Adreno from Qualcomm can probably drive 4k.

Desktops, compositing, and light effects like transparency are nothing next to video game or 3d model rendering. In practice, any GPU manufactured today is enough for non-3d purposes, unless you try running 3 4k monitors off the numberless hd graphics or something.

If you aren't getting 60 fps scrolling, it is usually due to the cpus being low powered and the application not using GL accelerated drawing for the scrolling.

Also, just because the GPU can power 4K doesn't mean it will for a reasonably small amount of power, such that the MBA can continue to pull a 12-hour battery life.

If you are plugged into a 4k monitor, you are probably reasonably close to a power outlet.

Theoretically, Thunderbolt is capable of being your power outlet.

Yeah but if you're powering your 4K monitor from Thunderbolt, I doubt you'd get that 12 hour battery life either :D

The iPad 3 could refresh 2/3 of the pixels at 60fps using less power than the Macbook Air.

In practice, yes. In technicality, Apple probably could have done it already if they needed to.. Samsung has an ultrabook that's smaller than the 13" MacBook Air and rocks a 3200x1800 screen: http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/pcs/NP940X3G-K01US .. I've been tempted to get one to Hackintosh, but I just know it'd be flaky as all get out.

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