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Comment by soniman | Hacker News Reader

Are laptop GPUs different from data center GPUs? I would assume that Linux is so prevalent in DC that support for Linux would be a given.

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Server processors usually don't come with iGPUs. There are some Xeon variants that have them but it's not common.

You're right though, servers usually have some sort of very basic GPU for basic graphics. Sometimes from Matrox and others.

The parent comment makes no sense at all for a different reason. Intel wants to enter the top dGPU market and yes, Linux dominates the server landscape and yes, Intel probably wants to sell dGPUs to all the cloud providers and would have to continue to support Linux in that case.

Parent comment is simply FUD. It's sad it's been upvoted.

You first need to ask "are data center GPUs?"

Many run completely headless and have no GPU at all, either on PCIe or in the processor.

I thought GPUs were involved in all sorts of calcuations like matrix calculations that had nothing to do with graphics.

My understanding is that's not correct. It's possible to do general purpose computing on a GPU with things like CUDA, but your code has to be specifically designed that way and is tied to the drivers/hardware you implement it for. It's not going to automatically happen if you write some matrix code.

I would guess most people aren't doing anything like that. If you are just running a basic site and database you don't need a GPU.

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