Friday, June 26, 2009

Anybody wanna hear how stupid Intel is?

So I was sitting and wondering to myself why a 4 watt processor (intel atom) needs a large (ok, medium by normal standards, but you would think something with a 4 watt draw could run on a cell phone battery) LI-Ion battery to get the spiffy 8+ hour runtime that the best netbooks keep bragging about. There is one very simple reason. Intel stubbornly refuses to let anybody else make a GPU pairing with their processor (even though Nvidia is doing this, Intel has been attempting to stop them in court for months). Why is this relevant you ask? because Intels 945 chipset, the one that is univerally packaged with the Atom, has a power envelope of 22 watts, over 5 times the draw of the CPU. With all that extra power, Intel's integrated graphics are still the absolute worse graphics solution ever made. Generally they can be outperformed by ABSOLUTELY ANY DROP IN EXPANSION CARD DESIGNED FOR PCI-E. Stupidity.

1 comment:

Jacob said...

Agreed, and their cpu-as-gpu project is beginning to look like Hitler's obsession with building the a super-bomber instead of the fighter aircraft he needed to win his war.