So with HD3000 being ~1/2 the GPU horse power of Trinity, and HD4000 being ~2x as powerful as HD3000 I guess that Intel will be slightly behind Trinity on gaming, while still holding the crown for all other performance metrics. All that is left to be seen is what kind of premium you will have to pay for the new IB laptops compared to the Trinity ones. Can't wait to see a review of both platforms in a head-to-head competition! I'm still an Intel fan boy at heart, but I would love nothing more than for AMD to give Intel a run for their money again
@Flap
It is not hard to push high resolution displays for most things. People have been using extremely old Matrox GPUs (g450 and g550) to do 4 high res monitors for ~10 years now with no issues. the problem comes when you want to game on that high resolution screen, and honestly neither side has a good solution for that yet. But at the same time, Macs are really not made with games in mind (other than web content which I am sure both Trinity and HD4000 would be more than capable of displaying).
@article
AMD is absolutely right; there are uses of a product that cannot be measured by benchmarks. However, the more interesting thing to me is what we are seeing in the desktop game benchmarks, that is slowly reaching into other areas of processing (and what we have seen in media playback benchmarks for years... or rather why we no longer have media playback benchmarks), where there is a level of speed impracticality.
For gaming on a 60FPS monitor, it no longer matters if you are running 61+FPS because you simply do not see it, and anything above 30FPS is generally considered 'acceptable'.
For office work on an SSD it does not matter if it takes your computer .5sec to open Word on a 5 year old PC, or .2sec on a new PC because there is simply no time for the human mind to react so quickly to move from the mouse to the keyboard and start typing. And anything slower than an SSD will rely on the bottleneck of the HDD anyways, making the CPU a moot point.
The same goes for browsing the web where your internet speed is so slow (even on 'fast' internet connections) that there is no practical/perceivable difference between running an old system vs a brand spanking new system (much less AMD vs Intel).
Media playback is another area where so long as you reach the requisite 12-30fps (depending on the source material) it does not matter if you are running on an Atom, or a high end duel 2011 platform. there is simply no difference so long as you reach a specific threshold of 'good enough' for the specific application
For larger projects of video editing, 3D design, mass data compression, etc. There is still a need for benchmarks, but the markets that need these high demand applications for everyday use are willing to shell out the money for whatever is fastest because the lost productivity time is much more expensive than the hardware investment (and 'the fastest' hardware is not expensive like it use to be for end-user workstations).
The point is that we need to find a new way to benchmark that looks at threshold requirements like we do with gaming benchmarks where there is a threshold of usefulness, and a threshold of imperceptible performance gains, and then finding a way to compare the relative usefulness of 'unbenchmarkable' feature sets (Like the value of CUDA vs Direct Compute, hardware based acceleration for specific software titles, and proprietary features such as Intel's Lightpeak/Thunderbolt technology). I think it means an evolution of doing hardware-centric benchmarks to more use-centric benchmarks, and even specific title benchmarks.
As an example: What does it look like to use Adobe premiere on an AMD or Intel platform of similar cost? What features are available on one platform over the other? What performance gains are made by adding an SSD/RAID or dedicated GPU to the system? And which platforms use these additions most effectively? What types of tasks run better or worse on each platform (Is one better at specific filters than others? Is one better for production use while the other is better at exporting a final product?)?
We are getting to a point where what matters more is the feature set/limitations of the motherboard and platform, than the speed of any individual component on the platform when it comes to the final experience of the end user. There is still a need for specific part reviews, but AMD is right; the individual parts many times do not paint an accurate picture for the speed or usefulness of a platform, and it is a trend that will only become more pronounced with time.
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