they have to get it within an extremely tight heat and power envelope, without killing performance -- I can understand the reason for the expense there
Intel arguably has an easier time with designing their iGPUs because they are at a point where their current engineering is well within power and heat tolerances, and they have significant legroom for adding on performance
and their fab is a lot smaller than the state of the art for dGPUs
I wouldn't discount the possibility of a fairly beastly iGPU or very small on-motherboard dGPU by Intel for ultrabooks or small laptops (11" or so) this decade... likely able to challenge mid-grade desktop dGPUs of a similar model year
but who knows, maybe they won't pull it off
too bad you didn't get a CPU with the Iris Pro 5200 graphics ... would love to see how that works in real world situations
unless you're playing Crysis or Star Citizen, or for some reason can't live with graphics on lower than 16x FSAA/AF and highest shadow quality, Iris Pro 5200 should actually be viable for real gaming
if you had a Core i7 4950HQ instead of a 4700MQ, you could probably get decent battery life when running games off the iGPU, and acceptable performance too probably ;p
external keyboard? external monitors? lol. wow. I'd grab my desktop and stuff it in a box and check it in as luggage on the plane for that kind of trouble on a gaming laptop
hardware RAID-0 I/O throughput has me spoiled, though. couldn't ever go back to single HDD. single SSD maybe, but not single HDD
I know I'm taking a risk with it, but it's only two disks -- RAID-0 is minimally risky with 2 disks, the risk increases exponentially if you have more disks in RAID-0
@MichaelFrank I hate rushdown decks. and that sounds like a freaking rushdown deck. >_<
my most successful deck so far is a druid with... all kinds of weird stuff... lots of 1s and 2s, but then suddenly there are ogres and yetis and stormwind champions and they smack your face in
it's good in the early game because i have lots of high damage answers to stuff that people play early, but it really shines in the late game when people are like, struggling to spend all their removal to take out yetis, then i'm like, HELLO, 2 boulderfist ogres and a venture co mercenary! you lose!
watch TotalBiscuit's Lord of the Arena videos on youtube -- if you aren't hooked just by watching someone else play it, you lack the soul of a gamer ;p
one time in casual mode I fought a mage who ONLY ever used spells the entire fricking game until the very end, and his name was Kripp, and I won, and I spent like an hour trying to figure out it if it was THE Kripp just testing a deck, or some random guy
he was really good and slow and deliberate, and was able to continually remove my minions and deal damage to me with spells only without playing a single minion
at the very end when he realized he lost, he dropped two abominations and conceded
@Braiam whatever you say, say it in doge for maximum effect
wow very cool/fool
so workaholic
@LewsTherin you can get a general sense of the difference by comparing TDP; assuming the fab size is the same (as it is, for Ivy Bridge and Haswell aka 3rd and 4th gen Intel CPUs), the performance should scale somewhat linearly with TDP
if they were different fab sizes I'd be saying apples to oranges, but fab size is the same
you get about a 5% lead on performance per watt of TDP because Haswell is a newer arch than Ivy Bridge, but it really isn't a very significant innovation CPU-wise (Haswell, that is)
@LewsTherin something like that... it also depends on whether you are able to do any overclocking or turbo mode... if you compare base clocks it's probably close to 150%, but the "K" variant 3770K can pull away even further because it can exceed its TDP with overclocking
TDP = thermal design power, which is an approximate amount of wattage that the CPU won't go beyond mainly due to heat and voltage leakage concerns that start to become problematic beyond the TDP ceiling. although "K" variant CPUs can exceed TDP, while non-K CPUs can't
@LewsTherin well the current highest-end desktop CPUs are actually Ivy Bridge Enthusiast (shorthand Ivy-E), which is a scaled-up Ivy Bridge chip with no graphics chip onboard, but with more cores and clock rate and cache
the 3770K is a mainstream Ivy chip
although the way Intel has their enthusiast chips releasing long after the mainstream, there is no Haswell-E available (and it won't be until maybe Q4 2014 at the earliest), and Ivy-E is faster than mainstream Haswell
4820K, 4930X and 4960X are Ivy Bridge enthusiast parts. they are all similar but with different levels of stepping / clock rate. The Enthusiast parts are in a class of their own, they are worlds apart from even a 4770K
@LewsTherin well, unless battery technology reaches a breakthrough that revolutionizes several industries (cars, electric grid energy storage, laptops, phones, etc), there will come a time in the not too distant future where you won't be able to use certain features of super high-end laptops at all unless you're on A/C power
the batteries just won't be able to provide enough voltage, or if they did, it'd either damage the batteries or run them dry in a few seconds
@LewsTherin they are still designing desktop replacement laptops to be able to be used with the battery for at least an hour or so, and the entire system is constrained by that
if you remove the constraint on battery limiting the whole system, and just make it a plug-in only, you might as well buy a SFF desktop and stick a desktop HD7970 in it
Back around January or February, when I found out about this trip, as soon as I said I was going to Cuba, I got disconnected from the entire SE network for 2 hours... Yet, everyone acted like I was still here
@CanadianLuke I'm on a rand(0, 100) Mbit symmetrical connection... rand() gets invoked approximately every 2 minutes and gets rounded to one of three values: 0, 3, or 100
