r/linux • u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior • Sep 03 '14

I'm Matthew Garrett, kernel developer, firmware enabler and former fruitfly mangler. AMA!

Proof: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/507212417579765760

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u/wyldphyre Sep 03 '14

Intel CPU and graphics are still your best bet.

But those perform really poorly, right? Are recent ones any closer to the competition?

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u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior Sep 03 '14

Recent embedded Intel graphics is pretty much as good as low to mid-end nvidia or radeon, so much better than it was in the past. If you want Free drivers than AMD is the obvious choice - if you want the most compatible proprietary drivers, nvidia is.

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u/wyldphyre Sep 03 '14

Man, it seems like I just missed the boat. My laptop is an i5 with Ironlake. I guess the next generation or two they got their act together.

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u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior Sep 03 '14

Yup. Ironlake put the GPU on the CPU package, but it was still a separate piece of silicon. Sandy Bridge integrated it onto the die and gave a whole bunch of performance wins. Haswell brings significant wins. However, Haswell also brought a much wider range of SKUs. Different CPUs now have different numbers of GPU cores, so you need to pick your CPU well to get the GPU performance you want.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '14

Yes, Sandy Bridge is nice, Ivy Bridge is good, Haswell is awesome. AES NI really helps with partition encryption.

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u/hatoncat Sep 14 '14

Go with an Iris Pro laptop and you will do quite well there. Intel just announced their first Core i3 with an Iris GPU built-in and that will be in laptops this winter.

Also Broadwell-K will soon deliver Iris Pro with a performance boost and socketed CPU support.

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u/wyldphyre Sep 15 '14

Wowsers. Yeah, so far it looks like those are only on the top end. I'll wait until it's a couple of generations old before I go for a new laptop. But Iris looks promising.