Replies to post #112909 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[wbmw]

Chipgeek, I share your temperature concerns, but in many cases Ultrabooks have been lower temperature than SV laptops. I think the problem comes when you put the same 17W Ivy ULV processor in more aggressive convertible form factors, that the heat needs to go somewhere. This is especially true when you are running performance level apps for long duration.

According to the notebookcheck review of the XPS 12, the system running 3DMark06 in a loop dissipated up to 33W of power. That's compared to 11W in idle.

I think Haswell will help here. Using a 10W processor will directly benefit total system power. The idle power reductions will also help with battery life in these constrained form factors.

In terms of gaming, I think gaming developers need to meet half way here. In order to give the kind of performance of a discrete graphics device, you're looking at 30-50W of power (on the low end!), just to get the frame rates necessary to run games like Battlefield 3 at medium settings. Not even Intel can get that below 10W with just a single process node advantage.

Portable gaming systems have compromised a lot of performance in order to be "mobile", not to mention that iPad as well is quite meager, even by HD 4000 standards. Yet ISV's have done incredible work to develop games like Infinity Blade, which work quite well, given the limitations.

With the laptop space quickly moving to low power, I would think they'd want to optimize for the better graphics Intel can deliver in a ULV processor, which is still far better than what you can get in an iPad. We'll have to see if that's the case.

[DavidA2]

This behavior during load is my biggest worry about ultrabooks, convertible or otherwise.

I don't see why it should be a surprise. Better performance directly translates into more power used. If you don't do anything demanding, it'll scale down and not be hot.

If anybody is hoping that Ivy Bridge ultrabooks are going to provide a mobile gaming platform, I think they will be disappointed. And that's too bad, because I think that's something that could really propel mass market acceptance.

"Mass market" meaning few million units or Intel-wise "Mass market"? I know these will do well running really popular games like World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and that's what people will care about. No one buys these things expecting to play Crysis(or revision of).

What I don't know is if things will improve with less resource-intensive games. If somebody fires up Angry Birds, will the simple act of turning on the high-performance graphics core crater the system power? Basically, I'm wondering if ultrabooks could come up short relative to tablets when playing casual games, because tablets have low-power graphics cores while Ivy Bridge is still chasing high-performance. I don't think that the EUs within the Ivy Bridge graphics core are dynamically configurable. Are they?

Why do you think it can't? How does a system with 17W chip power get 6 hours of battery life with a 47WHr capacity one? That's because it can scale.

You haven't bothered to read these things, have you? Angry Birds isn't even a game in terms of what we are talking about(that is, resource and power). The original Starcraft that was introduced in 1995 is more demanding than Angry Birds. Not to mention they are both 2D, which doesn't need EUs or jargons used in graphics.

Plus, no Tablet or Smartphone graphics is even near what's on PC. First of all, the screens are relatively tiny, so developers can scale down details and quality and it would be far less noticeable. PC gamers play in average probably 19 inch screens, and lot of them have 24+ inch ones.

Tablet/Smartphone "Casual" gaming = Angry Birds, Slotomania, Fruit Ninja, etc

PC "Casual" gaming = LoL, WoW, SC2, etc