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by WillFlux 1354 days ago
Intel might not even be making another generation of discrete consumer GPUs. See the numerous stories in the tech press over the last few months.

We have to hope AMD has the price, and just as importantly volume, to make the GPU market competitive.

2 comments

> Intel might not even be making another generation of discrete consumer GPUs

That might be ok. The integrated graphics on Intel chips are getting better - probably 100% thanks to the discrete GPU effort.

Apple has shown with the M1/M2 that integrated graphics can be really quite good even without high-end Nvidia performance. If Intel matches that, they could own the low-to-mid range just by selling CPUs and leave Nvidia in a pickle with no profitable market for their binned chips.

Apple deliver an absolute fuckton of memory bandwidth to their SoCs. A base M2 is swimming in 100GB/sec of memory bandwidth while the i7-1265U is 4/5 of that. All of the M1 dies are well above that number while on the Intel side the top of the line H and HX monsters are still limited to the 82GB/sec that dual channel LPDDR5-5200 puts out.
Intel is going in the right direction: the 13th-gen chips are at 89.5GB/sec with DDR5-5600 memory.

Don't think about the present, think about what the landscape could look like in 3-5 years ;)

I think Apple is achieving that bandwidth with DDR4.
They're achieving that bandwidth by putting ridiculous bus widths on the SoCs. The M1 Pro has a 256-bit bus to memory, the M1 Max has a 512-bit bus to memory, and the M1 Ultra has a 1024-bit bus to memory.
No, Apple isn't achieving that bandwidth with DDR4: "M2 uses LPDDR5-6400"

Don't get me wrong, it's stunning performance, and having it on the same package as the CPU and GPU has other benefits.

Ah they upgraded the ram between M1 and 2 then.
IMO that shouldn't be a concern to those looking at buying this gen. The tech will move into their integrated CPU's, so drivers will be maintained well into the future.