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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

I like my Intel graphics.

Good battery life on my laptop, good Linux support on my desktop. What's not to like?

I agree. No bullshit support for Linux / *BSD is a huge selling point for Intel video. If Intel made a dedicated video card that packed more performance (and I don't even care about matching NVidia) I'd probably buy it.

I can't dispute that Intel video is simple and that's nice, but that's a failing of NVidia and AMD, who happen to be the primary discrete GPU manufacturers, and not an indicator that integrated graphics is a good idea.

Definitely! If I could get an NVidia or AMD discrete graphics card with the same support for Open Source as Intel, I'd be even happier.

As for integrated graphics being a good or bad idea, I'd guess that power consumption vs. performance is the real differentiator there.

The poor performance (as well as perf/W for all but 2D graphics). Compare it to an NVIDIA chip of similar die size, TDP, and target form-factor. You'll realize that most Intel chips (other than the top of the line like the P580) are not in the same ballpark. As much as I hate saying this, NVIDIA's drivers are stable on Linux -- and I know because I use them every day both for display and compute (in OpenCL/CUDA).

And stable on BSD. That's the crucial part for me.

Hmmm. I must be doing something wrong, because I feel like it's completely unstable for me. NUC6i5 with integrated Iris on Ubuntu 16.04. I get a dozen errors a day with the x server, and I get weird intermittent visual glitches with multiple monitors.

I have no need for high performance and Iris should be good enough, but the stability still leaves a lot to be desired.

Ubuntu 16.04 is pretty old code. I would try a mainline kernel (currently http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.11.3/) and maybe even more up to date userspace libraries (but then you're getting into a dependency mess. replacing just the kernel is easy).

Likewise. I had to go to Ubuntu 14.04 to get reasonable Linux performance out of my NUC5i7.

I love the intel graphics linux driver. It's the only GPU with which I've been able to get HDMI working on a laptop in Linux.

What I don't like is Intel spending so much area for the iGPU[1]. Why should an iGPU be consuming nearly the same area as 4 cores? An area optimised iGPU that can only do a few GFLOPS is good enough, and where it isn't (gaming, deep learning), a discrete GPU with wide memory will be needed anyway.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-...

Nothing. But nice to have both options now, with GPU or with more cores, customer's choice.

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