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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad Intel are addressing the weakness of integrated graphics, I personally believe PC gaming has tons of potential to grow, as long as you can play a good chunk of new games on integrated graphics (not at the highest resolutions of course, but where it's still possible to play competitively).

As an aside, this won't help me, I'm never buying Intel again, not until they remove the AMT feature.

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Never heard of anybody having an issue with AMT/vPro.

you can disable it in the BIOS. It's a CPU feature meant for sysadmins, it's not like it enables access for intel. (although it could.. in theory).

what's your issue with AMT? (also, not all chips have it).

> "you can disable it in the BIOS. It's a CPU feature meant for sysadmins, it's not like it enables access for intel. (although it could.. in theory)."

Call me paranoid if you want, but I think the recent Windows 10 privacy debacle shows that even if you disable something, doesn't mean it's actually disabled.

> "what's your issue with AMT? (also, not all chips have it)."

My issue with AMT is one of security. I don't believe there won't be an exploit in the future, it's not out of the question, some versions of it have already been exploited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

AMT has full remote access to your computer, beyond OS control or visibility, and can be utilised even when the computer is in a powered off state (still needs to be connected to a power source and connected to a network of course). The risks are huge! I'd rather choose a competitor that doesn't have it.

Which Intel CPUs don't have AMT?

well, it's a case by case basis, but my desktop has this processor: http://ark.intel.com/products/77780/Intel-Core-i7-4930K

which does not have it

but my laptops both have it.. :\

http://ark.intel.com/products/43559/Intel-Core-i7-620LM

http://ark.intel.com/products/53464/Intel-Core-i7-2640M

It actually resides in the pch. The processor is called the management engine. In newer platforms, it gets to decide if the processor even gets to see the bios executable code.

All modern Intel chips have the dedicated, non-user-controlled management processor used for AMT/vPro whether they support the feature or not, and you can't disable it - the BIOS option just passes a flag to the code running on the management processor asking it nicely not to give anyone remote access to your PC. The area of Flash it boots from is even read-protected so you have no way of knowing what code it's actually running short of sticking the Flash chip in an external programmer.

Edit: Also, apparently at least some version allow remote provisioning of AMT with no user intervention even with it disabled in the BIOS. You need an expensive SSL certificate, but that'd be no obstacle for attackers like Hacking Team or the NSA. See http://people.kth.se/~maguire/DEGREE-PROJECT-REPORTS/100402-...

What do you use for a decent non-intel laptop?

I don't own a laptop at the moment (I only have a phone and an MP3 player), but if I did I'd probably go for a 64bit AMD APU-based machine or a ARM-based Chromebook with Linux or BSD (and fit a larger SSD).

Integrated graphics always seem like a bad deal. There worse than a cheap aka ~50$ graphics card and take up a lot of silicon on expensive CPU's.

If you go by transistor count it's easy to be spending well over 100$ for a terrible GPU which is then disabled. Honestly, if Intel where not effectively a monopoly there is no way they could get away with this crap.

PS: Due to issues with latency and sharing RAM bandwidth integrated graphics are always going to be a relatively bad deal.

Only because of the way they are currently implemented on PC. Both current-gen consoles for example use integrated graphics to great effect, but they are engineered around them with high-bandwidth memory (GDDR5 or eSRAM), as opposed to the after-thought they usually are on PC.

IMO, if you use dedicated GDDR5 ram it stops being integrated graphics. Granted, I can see the argument, but there are still issues with things like heat dissipation outside of low powered devices like a cellphone.

Iris Pro uses high-bandwidth eDRAM.

Haswell (Iris Pro) has 128MB of eDRAM on chip enabling it to do some benchmarks and games reasonably well. But, even low end (50$) GPU's have 1GB of DDR5.

So, it's yet another huge compromise. Granted, having huge amounts of L4 cache could in theory be very useful when you disable the graphics. Which they might do, I don't know a lot about Iris.

The current-gen consoles are effectively mid-range dedicated GPUs with a CPU integrated in terms of stuff like die area[1], compute and raster/pixel units, memory bandwidth, etc, and even then performance isn't exactly something to write home about.

[1] Compare http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2013/11/21/sony-ps4-ap... to the die shots in this article, for example.

It's still much better than anything integrated in the PC space.

DX12 adds support for pipelining across every GPU on a machine, potentially lighting up that "disabled silicon". This may be a value add enough reason for Intel to keep innovating its integrated graphics processing.

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