What's the problem with Iris Pros ?

I've been doing research on the new iGPUs and every time I get to the comments they seem to be mostly negatives (Andtech, etc) . Like it's on the Die, dGpus are better and it uses a lot more energy / battery then older iGpu for less performance and even that the Iris GPU cause the CPU clock speeds to decrease .

I'd like to hear some of your guys thoughts on it, if it's worth it . What are the pros and cons to it . I think it's perfect for me because I do a production (video, CS suites + Ableton + some more stuff) work (OpenCL seems to work better then some of the gaming dGPUs when it came to rendering), want something with a longish battery, only play low gpu intensive games and consume a lot of media . It seems to do everything I would want in a system (besides the price maybe) BUT I don't really know that much about computers to be sure that it really is a good fit for what I want it to do .

 

The main issue is that the Iris Pro is expensive. $400 for the BGA chip alone is a hard pill to swallow. Either you're going to have to buy an expensive ultrabook, or a budget laptop that had some corners cut (1366x768 resolution, bouncy keyboard, terrible trackpad, speakers buzz when playing bass, etc).

 

not sure where you read that Iris Pro has less performance than older IGP's, but that's a good reason not to base your decisions from the comment sections of articles It runs circles around any other Intel IGP. Sure, a midrange dedicated gpu will outperform it, but at the cost of battery life/usage.

The biggest problem with Iris Pro? Finding a notebook that's actually using it.

 

Most likely the upper end Macbooks and some $2000+ ultrabooks.

 

Which older IGPs ? Are there any data to support that (I just want to check myself) .

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1

This is what I'm looking at .

 

Iris Pro is expensive, power hungry, and sacrifices CPU performance for the extra GPU performance. They are just clocked lower by 400MHz. As far as power, I haven't seen power figures yet, but I can guarantee that it will push the limits of a 90W power supply when loaded (i.e. gaming), although idle power consumption may not be too bad. I just don't understand why it's an embedded CPU only. Doesn't make much sense to me. They've made CPU's in the past that are either PGA or BGA.

 

Embedded CPUs allow a slimmer design by 1-2 mm, and it's cheaper for Intel to manufacturer. The mobo manufacturer also don't have to install sockets for the embedded chips and simply provide a marked area to solder down the CPU.

The main downside is that if anything goes wrong with the embedded chip or the mobo (such as VRM or USB), both of them would have to be thrown out.

 

I know that. But my point was that they have made chips in the past in both a BGA and PGA form factor to supply the socket and embedded market. A CPU like this would have an interest in both markets.

 

As the guys have mentioned, its the cost. The biggest irony is that Iris Pro's 128mb L4 cache does wonders at speeding up general CPU performance (e.g. transcoding) yet is limited to BGA laptop chips. No DDR3 RAM subsystem to date can match that L4 cache at sheer bandwidth or latency. I would love to see a K-series desktop chip which isn't so constrained by TDP with Iris Pro since the 5200 + cache is a beast at transcoding yet without sacrificing CPU clockspeed. It was meant to replace the traditional dGPU in multimedia laptops (i.e. 15.6inch machines with weedy low-end GPUs) though I would debate the battery life gains since Optimus does a pretty good job nowadays.

 

I was wondering how much battery it uses compared to a dGPU .

What is BGA laptop chips ? What do you mean when you say the irony ? Is the cache limited in mobiles ?

 

BGA is ball grid array (soldered), PGA is pin grid array or socketed.

 

BGA laptop chips are soldered on to the motherboard, this means that in order to have Iris Pro, you have to design a motherboard around it. The irony is that this massive performance part is only going to be destined for Ultrabooks when it would also greatly benefit desktop and high performance gaming laptops if it were on a chip that comes in a socket.
It would especially benefit desktops because you can have Iris Pro AND a high clocked CPU without having both to share a limited TDP. Both would be able to run at full speed.

 

My only question is that will these pros be able to MATCH or get anywhere near the ultrabook batteries w/o a 1k premium .

 

$400 chip, leaving $600 for other stuff? I don't like the corner cuttings that will come with it.

 

Eh, no. Iris Pro is for quad core Notebooks, the Iris 5100 and the HD 5000 is for Ultrabooks.