This is where I can see Apple throwing its weight around. I can see Apple strong arming Intel into supporting OpenCL, even if it?s special category just for Mac notebook that aren?t found on Intel?s price list. It?s not like there isn?t precedence to support this possibility.
It depends. Intel's design philosophy seems to be toward fixed function hardware outside the CPU. Meaning that the GPU design may not be suitable for GPGPU and no amount of driver tweaks is going to change that.
I believe Apple has pull. I don't think Apple has THAT much pull to have a custom IGP on the die.
Anandtech's preview of Sandy Bridge makes it sound very promising. Even the integrated graphics sounds pretty good.
The interesting thing is that those game benchmarks is without a working turbo mode. It won't help you for sustained frame rates in something like a long WoW raid but for short periods the GPU can ramp up for more performance.
I might guess that the TurboBoost would also be able to ramp the IGP up at the expense of one of the two cores. That would be handy if true if you are GPU bound and not CPU bound. That might make sustained graphic performance a possibility for games that don't normally use more than one core.
i understand the whole problem with the graphics in macs 13in and below (mbp 13, and macbook). but what about macbook pros 15in and above? what graphics will be used for that? AMD or possibly nVidia still? is AMD better or not?
i apologize for posting such an ignorant question...
There's nothing in there that immediately puts them off using it alone. It's good enough but not so good you will want it over a more expensive model.
Which brings us back to the original question, will this actually perform better than an older CPU (C2D) with a better IGP (Nvidia 320M)? My guess is that they are evaluating that in Cupertino as we speak. Which doesn't make buying the 13" MBP today any easier...
Inthought Intel and NVidia had settled their suit. When I did a search I didn't see anything definitive but the trial was supposed to start on the 6th. Assuming a settlement is in place and it allows NVidia to make chipsets for intel chips, Apple would be able to use both intels latest chips and NVidia's integers graphics chips.
Inthought Intel and NVidia had settled their suit. When I did a search I didn't see anything definitive but the trial was supposed to start on the 6th. Assuming a settlement is in place and it allows NVidia to make chipsets for intel chips, Apple would be able to use both intels latest chips and NVidia's integers graphics chips.
The GPU performance as a GPU is slightly better than the 320M as the 5450 is slightly better than the 320M.
The desktop 5450 is, the mobile variant isn't. The Anand benchmark uses the desktop version. Given that Sandy Bridge is supposed to be faster than the 5450 though, it could still be on par or better than the 320M. If that was without Turbo Boost, it's going to be awesome. Something doesn't seem right though. It's almost as if Anand are being led to thinking they have a 6EU chip with no Turbo Boost, which would imply the final version will be 2-3 times faster. Intel also failed to disclose information about their own GPU demos with Starcraft 2 and I think it was Mass Effect compared to an unspecified dedicated chip.
If Anand in fact have a 12EU chip with Turbo Boost, the final version will be slower because the chip will ramp down to near half the clock speed in certain cases.
We'll find out soon enough. Let's not forget though that even if Intel do match the 320M, they are catching up to NVidia's last generation chip. If they hadn't blocked NVidia illegally, they'd be coming in at half NVidia's latest GPU.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John.B
Which brings us back to the original question, will this actually perform better than an older CPU (C2D) with a better IGP (Nvidia 320M)? My guess is that they are evaluating that in Cupertino as we speak. Which doesn't make buying the 13" MBP today any easier...
The i5 chips are much faster than the C2D. I reckon that the gaming performance will be on par at best with 320M but with fewer supported features and what Apple could do this time is focus on the media encoding performance and battery life.
It wouldn't be wise to buy a new one before the new one arrives because you'll still be able to buy a refurb at a lower price if the GPU part in SB turns out to be not so good.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mynameisjoe
Inthought Intel and NVidia had settled their suit. When I did a search I didn't see anything definitive but the trial was supposed to start on the 6th. Assuming a settlement is in place and it allows NVidia to make chipsets for intel chips, Apple would be able to use both intels latest chips and NVidia's integers graphics chips.
Yeah but NVidia have already said they aren't making chipsets for Intel CPUs any more. The settlement would be to do with SLI noted here:
If Anand in fact have a 12EU chip with Turbo Boost, the final version will be slower because the chip will ramp down to near half the clock speed in certain cases.
Anand had doubts about it being a 6EU chip since it wasn't specified but I thought he was told turboboost was broken. Meh, I don't care enough to reread that article.
Quote:
We'll find out soon enough. Let's not forget though that even if Intel do match the 320M, they are catching up to NVidia's last generation chip.
True, but it's not a step back. Intel IGP has been major suckage for a long long time and there was much deserved griping about the performance of the GMA 950 and GMA X3100 based macbooks.
It's almost as if Anand are being led to thinking they have a 6EU chip with no Turbo Boost, which would imply the final version will be 2-3 times faster.
I wrote that with the intention of it coming across like it could never happen. Well, I think I just got one of the biggest shocks of my life :
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units?? The GTX has 192!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
True, but it's not a step back.
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units?? The GTX has 192!!
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
That doesn't make sense.
If its too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
Anand had doubts about it being a 6EU chip since it wasn't specified but I thought he was told turboboost was broken. Meh, I don't care enough to reread that article.
True, but it's not a step back. Intel IGP has been major suckage for a long long time and there was much deserved griping about the performance of the GMA 950 and GMA X3100 based macbooks.
Looks like you're going to be right about Apple going with the new Intel HD graphics only in some Macs. Lets hope you're right that its a good idea.
If its too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
Yeah, the test machine used NVidia Optimus to test the Sandy Bridge IGP so there's a possibility that 3DMark mixed up the scores somehow. If the IGP was that quick, the manufacturer would have no reason to include both unless the machine could use both in hybrid SLI.
It's not entirely unbelievable though. Like I say, if the Anand preview chip had 6 EUs and no Turbo boost, then it's possible. The test chip would have scored in the region of 4000-5000. If you double the GPU cores, you get 8000-10000. The shader clock ramps from 650MHz to 1300MHz in the i7 with Turbo boost enabled, so double again to 16000-20000 at maximum performance.
They said they used technology from Larrabee to make these IGPs so maybe they figured out how to do these things properly.
Still, this goes against the laws of nature so no, it's not possible and Intel's IGPs will always suck as they always have done.
in the last year or two someone did a test and believe it or not IE came out as the most energy efficient browser. firefox was the worst. forgot where safari, opera and chrome ended up
AnandTech has done a several such tests. On Mac OS X Safari is the most power efficient. On Windows IE is the most power efficient. Obviously disabling Flash makes the browsers even more efficient.
Also, Mac OS X is more power efficient than Windows.
This is a good decision. Most people don't play 3D games and won't notice a slight reduction in graphics performance, but they might notice a (comparatively much larger) increase in CPU performance, and they will notice an increase in battery life.
OpenCL is never going to amount to anything on such low-end GPUs as the Nvidia IGP's we're discussing.
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units?? The GTX has 192!!
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
No freaking way it's benching 16K with 3DMark 06. Okay that's the i7 and more headroom but it shouldn't be that much better than the i5 Anand tested even with 6 more EU and turbo boost. Something is borked with that score.
This is a good decision. Most people don't play 3D games and won't notice a slight reduction in graphics performance, but they might notice a (comparatively much larger) increase in CPU performance, and they will notice an increase in battery life.
OpenCL is never going to amount to anything on such low-end GPUs as the Nvidia IGP's we're discussing.
I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you sure you aren't confusing OpenCL with OpenGL?
The promise of OpenCL is to unlock some of the power in the GPU for other than garden variety graphics processing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
OpenCL gives any application access to the Graphics Processing Unit for non-graphical computing. Thus, OpenCL extends the power of the Graphics Processing Unit beyond graphics (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units).
If Mac applications are going to start getting wide support for OpenCL-based applications, it'll be because it's ubiquitous. Otherwise we're back to that whole chicken vs. the egg thing; if only some Macs have OpenCL support, what developers are going to add that into the next version of their applications?
Personally I think this is nonsense and somehow geared towards endorsing Intel and Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge MBP 13" will have AMD lower-5000-series discrete GPUs. The power sacrifice would be fairly minimal, AMD has some excellent basic discrete GPUs that still blow Intel's BundleGate RubbishGPUs? out of the water. MBA will stay on Core2, so that's 320M for the foreseeable calendar 1st half of 2011.
Fusion is not an option yet for MBA, maybe, maybe calendar 2nd of 2011.
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units?? The GTX has 192!!
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
Those results don't make sense. Rough estimates from my readings online reflect Sandy Bridge IGPs to be between the Arrandale IGPs and the 9400M. Highly unlikely to be better.
BTW doesn't 3DMark06 reflect a combined CPU+GPU score? In which case the CPU score may be skewing things massively, or some other mistakes. What's the 3DMark06 GPU score? and don't have time to dive into this further.
I'll repeat my assertion: Sandy Bridge IGPs are still, crap. Feel free to prove me wrong. (Not being sarcastic here)
Comments
This is where I can see Apple throwing its weight around. I can see Apple strong arming Intel into supporting OpenCL, even if it?s special category just for Mac notebook that aren?t found on Intel?s price list. It?s not like there isn?t precedence to support this possibility.
It depends. Intel's design philosophy seems to be toward fixed function hardware outside the CPU. Meaning that the GPU design may not be suitable for GPGPU and no amount of driver tweaks is going to change that.
I believe Apple has pull. I don't think Apple has THAT much pull to have a custom IGP on the die.
Anandtech's preview of Sandy Bridge makes it sound very promising. Even the integrated graphics sounds pretty good.
The interesting thing is that those game benchmarks is without a working turbo mode. It won't help you for sustained frame rates in something like a long WoW raid but for short periods the GPU can ramp up for more performance.
I might guess that the TurboBoost would also be able to ramp the IGP up at the expense of one of the two cores. That would be handy if true if you are GPU bound and not CPU bound. That might make sustained graphic performance a possibility for games that don't normally use more than one core.
i apologize for posting such an ignorant question...
There's nothing in there that immediately puts them off using it alone. It's good enough but not so good you will want it over a more expensive model.
Which brings us back to the original question, will this actually perform better than an older CPU (C2D) with a better IGP (Nvidia 320M)? My guess is that they are evaluating that in Cupertino as we speak. Which doesn't make buying the 13" MBP today any easier...
Inthought Intel and NVidia had settled their suit. When I did a search I didn't see anything definitive but the trial was supposed to start on the 6th. Assuming a settlement is in place and it allows NVidia to make chipsets for intel chips, Apple would be able to use both intels latest chips and NVidia's integers graphics chips.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...-for-apple.ars
Even if that pans out, we don't know is if this is the direction Apple will go.
The GPU performance as a GPU is slightly better than the 320M as the 5450 is slightly better than the 320M.
The desktop 5450 is, the mobile variant isn't. The Anand benchmark uses the desktop version. Given that Sandy Bridge is supposed to be faster than the 5450 though, it could still be on par or better than the 320M. If that was without Turbo Boost, it's going to be awesome. Something doesn't seem right though. It's almost as if Anand are being led to thinking they have a 6EU chip with no Turbo Boost, which would imply the final version will be 2-3 times faster. Intel also failed to disclose information about their own GPU demos with Starcraft 2 and I think it was Mass Effect compared to an unspecified dedicated chip.
If Anand in fact have a 12EU chip with Turbo Boost, the final version will be slower because the chip will ramp down to near half the clock speed in certain cases.
We'll find out soon enough. Let's not forget though that even if Intel do match the 320M, they are catching up to NVidia's last generation chip. If they hadn't blocked NVidia illegally, they'd be coming in at half NVidia's latest GPU.
Which brings us back to the original question, will this actually perform better than an older CPU (C2D) with a better IGP (Nvidia 320M)? My guess is that they are evaluating that in Cupertino as we speak. Which doesn't make buying the 13" MBP today any easier...
The i5 chips are much faster than the C2D. I reckon that the gaming performance will be on par at best with 320M but with fewer supported features and what Apple could do this time is focus on the media encoding performance and battery life.
It wouldn't be wise to buy a new one before the new one arrives because you'll still be able to buy a refurb at a lower price if the GPU part in SB turns out to be not so good.
Inthought Intel and NVidia had settled their suit. When I did a search I didn't see anything definitive but the trial was supposed to start on the 6th. Assuming a settlement is in place and it allows NVidia to make chipsets for intel chips, Apple would be able to use both intels latest chips and NVidia's integers graphics chips.
Yeah but NVidia have already said they aren't making chipsets for Intel CPUs any more. The settlement would be to do with SLI noted here:
http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/c...157&xhtml=true
If Anand in fact have a 12EU chip with Turbo Boost, the final version will be slower because the chip will ramp down to near half the clock speed in certain cases.
Anand had doubts about it being a 6EU chip since it wasn't specified but I thought he was told turboboost was broken. Meh, I don't care enough to reread that article.
We'll find out soon enough. Let's not forget though that even if Intel do match the 320M, they are catching up to NVidia's last generation chip.
True, but it's not a step back. Intel IGP has been major suckage for a long long time and there was much deserved griping about the performance of the GMA 950 and GMA X3100 based macbooks.
It's almost as if Anand are being led to thinking they have a 6EU chip with no Turbo Boost, which would imply the final version will be 2-3 times faster.
I wrote that with the intention of it coming across like it could never happen. Well, I think I just got one of the biggest shocks of my life
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/08/u...intel-sandy-b/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...y-wanna-c.html
3DMark 06
Sandy Bridge IGP: 15,940
Radeon 6900M: 20,155
Geforce GTX 460M: 16,957
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units??
True, but it's not a step back.
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
I wrote that with the intention of it coming across like it could never happen. Well, I think I just got one of the biggest shocks of my life
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/08/u...intel-sandy-b/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...y-wanna-c.html
3DMark 06
Sandy Bridge IGP: 15,940
Radeon 6900M: 20,155
Geforce GTX 460M: 16,957
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units??
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
That doesn't make sense.
If its too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
Anand had doubts about it being a 6EU chip since it wasn't specified but I thought he was told turboboost was broken. Meh, I don't care enough to reread that article.
True, but it's not a step back. Intel IGP has been major suckage for a long long time and there was much deserved griping about the performance of the GMA 950 and GMA X3100 based macbooks.
Looks like you're going to be right about Apple going with the new Intel HD graphics only in some Macs. Lets hope you're right that its a good idea.
That doesn't make sense.
If its too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
Yeah, the test machine used NVidia Optimus to test the Sandy Bridge IGP so there's a possibility that 3DMark mixed up the scores somehow. If the IGP was that quick, the manufacturer would have no reason to include both unless the machine could use both in hybrid SLI.
It's not entirely unbelievable though. Like I say, if the Anand preview chip had 6 EUs and no Turbo boost, then it's possible. The test chip would have scored in the region of 4000-5000. If you double the GPU cores, you get 8000-10000. The shader clock ramps from 650MHz to 1300MHz in the i7 with Turbo boost enabled, so double again to 16000-20000 at maximum performance.
They said they used technology from Larrabee to make these IGPs so maybe they figured out how to do these things properly.
Still, this goes against the laws of nature so no, it's not possible and Intel's IGPs will always suck as they always have done.
AMD's Zacate only got 2135:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1470/7/
depends on the browser as well
in the last year or two someone did a test and believe it or not IE came out as the most energy efficient browser. firefox was the worst. forgot where safari, opera and chrome ended up
AnandTech has done a several such tests. On Mac OS X Safari is the most power efficient. On Windows IE is the most power efficient. Obviously disabling Flash makes the browsers even more efficient.
Also, Mac OS X is more power efficient than Windows.
OpenCL is never going to amount to anything on such low-end GPUs as the Nvidia IGP's we're discussing.
I wrote that with the intention of it coming across like it could never happen. Well, I think I just got one of the biggest shocks of my life
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/08/u...intel-sandy-b/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...y-wanna-c.html
3DMark 06
Sandy Bridge IGP: 15,940
Radeon 6900M: 20,155
Geforce GTX 460M: 16,957
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units??
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
No freaking way it's benching 16K with 3DMark 06. Okay that's the i7 and more headroom but it shouldn't be that much better than the i5 Anand tested even with 6 more EU and turbo boost. Something is borked with that score.
This is a good decision. Most people don't play 3D games and won't notice a slight reduction in graphics performance, but they might notice a (comparatively much larger) increase in CPU performance, and they will notice an increase in battery life.
OpenCL is never going to amount to anything on such low-end GPUs as the Nvidia IGP's we're discussing.
I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you sure you aren't confusing OpenCL with OpenGL?
The promise of OpenCL is to unlock some of the power in the GPU for other than garden variety graphics processing.
OpenCL gives any application access to the Graphics Processing Unit for non-graphical computing. Thus, OpenCL extends the power of the Graphics Processing Unit beyond graphics (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units).
If Mac applications are going to start getting wide support for OpenCL-based applications, it'll be because it's ubiquitous. Otherwise we're back to that whole chicken vs. the egg thing; if only some Macs have OpenCL support, what developers are going to add that into the next version of their applications?
Fusion is not an option yet for MBA, maybe, maybe calendar 2nd of 2011.
My gut 2 cents.
I wrote that with the intention of it coming across like it could never happen. Well, I think I just got one of the biggest shocks of my life
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/08/u...intel-sandy-b/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...y-wanna-c.html
3DMark 06
Sandy Bridge IGP: 15,940
Radeon 6900M: 20,155
Geforce GTX 460M: 16,957
If those benchmarks are accurate, what you are looking at is an Intel IGP that is 3 times faster than the 320M and in the same performance range as class 1 NVidia and AMD GPUs. This is the higher TDP quad-core CPU but AFAIK, the GPU is the same.
How the f did they do that with 12 processing units??
Yeah, it seems like it might turn out ok after all.
Those results don't make sense. Rough estimates from my readings online reflect Sandy Bridge IGPs to be between the Arrandale IGPs and the 9400M. Highly unlikely to be better.
BTW doesn't 3DMark06 reflect a combined CPU+GPU score? In which case the CPU score may be skewing things massively, or some other mistakes. What's the 3DMark06 GPU score?
I'll repeat my assertion: Sandy Bridge IGPs are still, crap. Feel free to prove me wrong. (Not being sarcastic here)