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If you own or have looked at a low end laptop, you might have noticed it doesn’t have a video card. What it does have is an Intel GMA. A GMA, or Graphics Media Accelerator, is a GPU that rests on top of the motherboard with the CPU. Now you might be laughing about this article, I mean, how can an integrated GPU that shares the main memory with the CPU outperform a dedicated video card? Well it has to do with Intel’s new technology.
The GMA has been spotted on HP and Dell laptops, but the number one place people seem to notice it is on Apple’s MacBooks. Many people have complained that the MacBook’s gaming capabilities are low. This is true — they are — but the GMA has improved much since then. The MacBook started out with the GMA x950; this card could use 64 MB of system RAM for graphics and run up to 133-250 MHz. Since the last update, the MacBooks gained the Santa Rosa chipset. If you’re a little slow with computer technology, Santa Rosa is code name for the newest Centrino chipset. Although the speed (hertz) didn’t increase much, the performance of the MacBooks did. They also gained a new GPU: the GMA x3100. This GPU can go up to 500 MHz and 384 MB of RAM, a big upgrade from the previous models. Apple has limited the MacBook one to only use up to 133 MB of RAM.
In the second quarter of 2008, Intel plans to ship the GMA x4500. Intel says the x4500 is going to be three times as fast as the x3100, using DDR3 memory. Now of course other chips are already using DDR3, but Intel plans to use something else in late 2008-2009.
In 2009, Intel plans to finally release an all new form of graphics processing code named Larrabee. Larrabee is a GPU that can contain multiple cores. Now when I say multiple, I don’t mean four or six cores. I’m talking about 16-20 cores pact all in one GPU. By the end of 2008, Intel plans to release a form of this, which is a hybrid CPU/GPU chip all in one. With two to four cores in 2008, and possibly up to 16 in 2009 working as both the CPU and GPU, it seems Intel plans to wipe out the dedicated video card market.
It sounds like the cores will be virtually separated. This means four cores will act like eight cores (four for CPU, four for GPU). The technology behind “splitting” the cores is called HyperThreading (HT). Intel says the HyperThreading technology creates a thread-level parallelism on each core providing more efficient use of processor resources.
At this point, I’m not sure if Intel will make dedicated cards obsolete, but I do know it is progressing on a new next generation graphics chipset.