Intel abandons discrete graphics for HPC Intel is leaving the discrete graphics market to Nvidia and AMD/ATI for now, but its orphaned GPU/CPU mashup, Larrabee, will soon see new life in the HPC space. In a Tuesday posting on the Technology@Intel blog, director of global communications Bill Kircos communicated with the globe to say that Larrabee the graphics …
SSDs
Intel does one thing well: Silicon
Anything else is a distraction to make it seem like they are "doing something to increase shareholder value." Very soon here, (you watch,) there will come the "focusing on our core competency." This is followed by MASSIVE layoffs, selling off or closing business units and of course, “increased shareholder value.”
People slate the Intel graphics chipsets without understanding what they generally are : a low power integrated productivity chipset with adequate video playback facilities.
It has no problems with apps and high resolutions (because it has no discrete memory, it's easier and cheaper to support higher resolutions over some low end chipsets with limited discrete memory), many of the chipsets accelerate either standard definition or (in the latest releases) high resolution video. It manages basic 3D, depending on just how many shaders are required.
The drivers have been a little hit and miss, but the basic hardware capability is ok for most purposes other than games. Cross platform support is fine too.
I ran Google Earth on my work PC which contains a less than inspiring 82945G chipset. It needs to be run in DirectX in safe mode to avoid some graphics corruption, and the drivers aren't fantastic (Windows 7, but WDDM 1.0). Nevertheless, it works and the framerate is usable albeit jumpy rather than smooth.
HD does work, providing you have the right chipset, the right driver (i.e. Windows - forget it in anything else) and the right software. That's exactly the same as ATI and Nvidia, though - they'll do a full decode, but only for certain codecs.
My Thinkpad X61 has a somewhat better X3100 which manages to run some (older) 3D games quite well.
Don't get me wrong, my main system has an 8800GTX and a 7600GT; an upgrade will no doubt be an ATI 5+ series when they die. For work, I really don't mind the Intel chipsets, though.
Back in the day when they bounced in with the i740 cards they were awesome
ran games on an 8mb card that required a 16mb card. Kept up astonishingly , with few driver updates and a very stable platform.
Intel had such an awesome graphics prospect but let it go.
And only having this two horse race in the GPU market isnt all that brilliant.
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