very strong vibes of “everyone at this company who knew how anything is supposed to work or was at all motivated to succeed left several years ago, but because its Place In The Market is unshakable, they’ve been in this weird pantomime ever since”
it feels like… EA Sports, like they’re incrementing a counter without remembering why
I don’t know if I can second-guess them but without process advantage design mistakes stack up quickly. Big.little seems to work at size with ARM server chips and Apple’s M1, though, so maybe it’s also a good idea in a high-power environment?
I don’t know what Intel’s hoping for on their GPU side. I could see them making a more aggressive play to fully capture all laptop GPUs but that’s not the message they’re leading with.
yeah that’s the bonkers part, they still control the laptop market to an embarrassing degree and they’re doing fuck all with it. if you’re at all excited about hardware I don’t see how you wouldn’t want to buy AMD on desktop and Apple on mobile going forward.
Ivy/Haswell-era iGPUs were pleasantly adequate, since then they’ve just gradually declined, and now they’re trying to get us excited about… what exactly? a datacentre product that’s made a half-assed effort for consumer awareness?
the contrast with 10 years ago – when they had conclusively beaten Cell/IBM’s most modern designs, before Apple ARM or CUDA were as generally impressive as they are now, and when Intel were basically singlehandedly pushing peak performance forward and giving consumers the best of it – is pretty wild, and sure everyone is trying to custom fab their own ARM chips now after Apple did it so there’s probably less talent to hoard, but still, my goodness
It’s the power and thermal limits holding iGPUs back, right? --that GPUs have just gotten hotter and that makes the on-chip approach less viable than it was? I remember around 2012 and the launch of the Iris they were comfortable ahead of the 2006-era consoles. Now not even AMD’s iGPUs are close to a base PS4, really.
it’s crazy, terrifying, and probably a good thing that four years of stagnation can turn them from two years ahead to two years behind
also I am learning that even small Unreal projects can’t fit in 16GB of RAM with Visual Studio holding the project and I finally have to face up to RAM prices being, what, exactly what they were when I bought this laptop six years ago
yeah, 100%. the M1 GPU is pretty competitive with a base PS4 (~2tflops) but it took the best 5nm design in the business.
I mean, bear in mind that the PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series all have “integrated” graphics on the same die as the CPU; the thermal and power issues of combining the two are not insurmountable, at least with enough volume and big enough fans
now, of course, integrated GPUs in a 0.5mm thick case with 15 watts to sip? that’s a different story entirely
Right, I guess a better way to put it is, within the power limits of laptops (10w/15w/45w) decent GPUs have gotten too fat. So the problem is to a certain extent mirrored with discrete GPUs in laptops – the ‘multimedia’ laptop with a *60-class GPU isn’t nearly as competitive as it was several years back.
on the plus side, game streaming is actually very credible now with several straightforward commercial options, which is even more reason to just get a Macbook
bah
doesn’t fit my use case, which is ‘light gamedev’, so, 45w CPU and midrange GPU and Windows and not embarrassing to look at are my primary needs
There’s always my dumb plan to use moonlight to stream the Windows stuff I need from a desktop 
There’s a cottage industry of cloud Windows VMs just to run Power BI for Mac users
and that’s the thing, streaming has finally become less painful than parallels-style visualization, especially if everything you’re streaming is because it needs a GPU more powerful than a couple tflops, and if you have the means to stream from your own windows desktop rather than just commercial services
I use steam cloud / moonlight / game pass pretty interchangeably on my Macbook at this point, the GPU on there is still minimally useful for blender or whatever, all happy happy
it really is the year of linux on the desktop, nocturne hd works in proton now
I have this backup laptop that I bought a while ago that I’ve wound up not really needing, very desperately, and now I’m thinking about saying fuck it and throwing Linux on it just so I can say I Have Done This Thing
my laptop is doing something funky again. when i turn it on the screen is blank and all i get is a blinking led on the caps lock key. I;ve tried rebooting, removing the battery and reseating the memory. any help is appreciated, its an hp 15 laptop
is the screen properly connected?
yeah everything is connected fine. it booted up normally once the other day but its back on its bullshit
Is my intuition correct that I should not care about 3,500 MB/s vs. 7,000 MB/s read speeds on an SSD? It’s a 30% price premium for double the performance but I’m skeptical I’d notice it.