Intel's end game with their HD Graphics iGPU?

[gongo]

What do you think guys...?

Their HD graphics are getting to the point where they are good enough as far as integrated graphics go, modern features, fast GUI. Yet they still want to integrate more and faster slices into the CPU...of which Skylake only accounts for 3-5% IPC improvement over Broadwell....why does Intel not put more effort back into pushing the CPU performance?? What is the point of packing faster integrated graphics when it can never match the moving demands of 3D graphics..

 

[eastmen]

what's the point of faster cpu when no one , arm or amd can keep up with your cpu power ? the 3-5% with sometimes a design getting 10% seems to keep them way in the lead. They however need better performance against both arm and amd in gpu side.

I mean excel doesn't really need to get faster , either does word or windows. The majority of people spend their time playing games or in apps and that is where a gpu can help esp with the explosion of screen resolution

 

[Deleted member 13524]

why does Intel not put more effort back into pushing the CPU performance?

Because there are diminishing returns in just boosting CPU performance, unlike e.g. power efficiency.

What is the point of packing faster integrated graphics when it can never match the moving demands of 3D graphics..

My Surface Pro 4 with a feeble Core m3 + HD515 GPU effortlessly rendering my assemblies in Solidworks 2015 and running quite a large portion of >3 year-old 3D games seems to disagree with you.
Yes, the demands are moving, but they're also not the same for every person and every situation.
Besides, the GPU can be used for more than 3D graphics nowadays.

 

[Blazkowicz]

ARM CPUs have been crazy on GPU features, DSP, image processor etc. for longer as they have "free silicon" to waste. It is easy enough to throttle down the GPU and turn off or wall off some features to save on heat and power.

Arguably Intel is now in the business of desktop-class CPU performance in 15 watts for laptops, with AMD trying to join. Also checkboxes keep coming : Vulkan, OpenCL 2.0, h265, encoding, vp9, new HDMI.
These might be perfectly useless, or vital depending on the user.

My complaint is hardware and even OSes are too good, there's no much tweaking, fiddling with drivers, disablibg crap to do and Windows > 7 even has a fixed GUI with not much to do

Also CPU grunt is sadly carried on with more cores. A dual core at 10Ghz would be almost always better than an 8 core at 3Ghz I think - if it were possible and not a non-performing disaster.

AMD will put 8 cores/16 threads in mainstream and then we'll need to wait for what Intel does with Cannon Lake/Ice Lake or even the one after that.

 

[Grall]

Also CPU grunt is sadly carried on with more cores. A dual core at 10Ghz would be almost always better than an 8 core at 3Ghz I think

Hm, not so sure. Thread switching latency in your dual core CPU might make a multitasking machine feel smoother. Even if programming was still monolithic like in the bad old days without breaking stuff up into jobs, there's still a fair amount of stuff being juggled in a modern PC. With just two cores available, stuff would necessarily have to sit there waiting to execute instead of, you know, being executed, like on a wider CPU.

...But this is just my speculation. Are you suggesting multithreaded CPU cores btw? So 4/16 threads? A good multithreaded implementation (IE, able to execute two different threads in the same cycle, assuming units are available), might give decent enough responsiveness.

My little 2C/4T sandybridge i7 macbook feels a little sluggish when a lot of stuff is going on, and I don't think it's just because base clock is >3GHz either IIRC.