GMA950 64mb + Shared Memory on Mac Mini
According to Apple the new GMA950 graphics chipset has 64mb onboard and can share up to 250mb of ram from the memory you put in the mac mini, whichi is good i guess. Not too bad.
"Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available"
It also supports realtime playback of up to 2 1080p streams without stutter.
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/
"Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available"
It also supports realtime playback of up to 2 1080p streams without stutter.
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/
Comments
Everything I have read always says integrated sucks. That was a nice thing about Apple is they did not use any integrated graphics chips. Also, it steals system RAM away so now the 512MB is no longer 512 dedicated to OS X.
On the upside, Apple notes there are now two DIMM slots, for a maximum * of 2GB
*Officially supported, probably spec'd on "reasonable prices" of available 1GB sticks.
Most modern Macs since the iMac Rev A have actually accepted greater than spec'd amounts of RAM per slot... I know users who are happily using 256MB sticks in old iMacs that were officially only rated for 64/128 per slot
It should theoretically be possible to run 2 x 2GB sticks in the new mini for a max of 4GB
This will make the hit from integrated graphics shared RAM less significant in % terms.
Max shared RAM according to intel is 224 MB
We'll have to wait for some CineBench or similar results to see what the actual +/- of the GMA950 is in various RAM/sharedVRAM configurations ~ vs. ~ prior 1.5 mini with Radeon 9200/64 VRAM ~ vs. ~ 'official/Apple Store' spec prior 1.42 mini with original Radeon 9200/32 VRAM
Originally posted here
GMA900 (915G) ______________________ GMA950 (945G)
Core frequency 333MHz ______________ 400MHz
Pixel rate 1.3 gigapixels per second ___ 1.6 gigapixels per second
Memory bandwidth 8.5GB/sec _________ 10.9GB/sec
Pixel shader support Up to 2.0 _________ Up to 2.0
The rendering engine supports all the texture modes you'd expect from a modern 3D engine, including cube map support, various texture blending modes, and S3TC texture compression. New this time around is support for anisotropic filtering. Note that vertex shaders are handled by the host processor, so the faster the CPU, the faster the vertex processing.
Or, from the proverbial Horse's Mouth... Intel's GMA950 specs page
It should theoretically be possible to run 2 x 2GB sticks in the new mini for a max of 4GB
Yonah is 32-bit, and 32-bit chipsets/chips can only use 2GB at a time, even if you stick 16GB there. It's a limitation of the architecture, not empty slots.
Edit: Yep, you are right.