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AMD Polaris in 13 inch rMBP
- Thread starter Aditya_S
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Very unlikely. I wont say impossible because.. well, who knows. But ill say very unlikely.
Apple uses ~35Watt discrete GPUs in the Macbook Pro 15". The fact that polaris is "cooler" is irrelevant, they would still use the same TDP thermal headroom in the design of the chasis. Given what they have to work with, and the fact that a polaris GPU under 35 watt is A) Unlikely to exist and B) wouldnt perform that well anyway, it simply doesnt make much sense.
Apple uses ~35Watt discrete GPUs in the Macbook Pro 15". The fact that polaris is "cooler" is irrelevant, they would still use the same TDP thermal headroom in the design of the chasis. Given what they have to work with, and the fact that a polaris GPU under 35 watt is A) Unlikely to exist and B) wouldnt perform that well anyway, it simply doesnt make much sense.
Thanks for the explanation, but, if that is the case, will the integrated graphics be Iris Pro 530, 550, or maybe even 580?
The 13" will almost certainly come with the Iris 550 (all models) and the 15" will almost certainly come with the Iris 580 (all models), with some also coming with Polaris (higher end models).
The available Skylake mobile chips with the Iris Pro 580 GPU are all 45W so unless Apple has a new thermal design (very unlikely), you won't see them in the new 13" MBP.
Yep no discrete GPU (you only have to look at the dGPU record to realise that even if they can put one in they almost certainly won't, as it's just another part to go wrong, and be drain on the battery) the 550 graphics will have a 64mb eDRAM cache though so should see some significant graphics increases on the 13 inch skylake.
will not happen. a dGPU is one of the main upsells Apple holds over people's heads, to spend more on a 15"
Putting a dGPU in a 13" would break their financial models for the MBP. Finances > customer satisfaction.
Putting a dGPU in a 13" would break their financial models for the MBP. Finances > customer satisfaction.
Not strictly speaking true. The retina version has never had a dGPU, but the older versions did, albeit 2010 and earlier.
- No, they didn't. 2010/320M and 2009/9400M were both integrated solutions.
I'm not sure what you mean, are you talking about the nvidia 320M and 9400M because I thought those were GPUs and not integrated.
- Yes, I am. 320M on 2010 13" and 9400M on 2009 13". Both are integrated GPUs, as can be read, respectively, in the second sentence of the graphics section of this Anandtech review and in the first sentence of this Notebookcheck review.
They were NVIDIAS silicon integrated onto the main Intel chip and using system RAM, by all measures they were an integrated chip.
No, they were a discrete GPU design integrated into an nVidia chipset. They were not part of the Intel CPU. It's why the Core 2 Duo hung around so long instead of transitioning to an i3 or i5.
No they were an integrated chip as a previous poster showed in their links to anandtech and notebook check reviews. They used system memory they are an integrated solution albeit using someone else's silicon. But believe what you like it makes little difference they were fairly rubbish and used very little power or thermal headroom and were a lot worse than current iGPU's.
- Whether or not they were a part of the Intel CPU makes not a little bit of difference. The definitional difference between a discrete graphics solution and an integrated graphics solution is that the discrete has its own (discrete) memory, whereas the memory for an integrated solution has to be shared (integrated) with system RAM.
The GPUs in question shared their memory with system RAM; hence they are integrated. Since you seem a little stubborn, I'm including even more references (I would have thought the previous ones were sufficient, but whatever):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#Dedicated_graphics_cards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#Integrated_graphics_solutions
@JTToft is on point today!
As lovely as it would be to have a dGPU in the 13" there is zero possibility of Apple doing that.
As lovely as it would be to have a dGPU in the 13" there is zero possibility of Apple doing that.