[why not the LS2/LS7? @ Sep 19th 2007 4:15PM]

Why would Intel enter the discrete graphics market?

It'll be a dying market by then.

It's the same as the audio add-on card market. It took less time to integrate onto the motherboard since it required fewer transistors.

But in the end, much like serial ports, parallel ports and RTCs (AST SixPack Plus and later Super I/O chips), floating point coprocessors (8087, 80287, 80387 disappeared at the 486) and sound cards (Soundblasters), graphics will be part of the CPU or motherboard.

Discrete graphics will be a very small market.

[Josh Warner @ Sep 19th 2007 5:14PM]

I'm going to go ahead and assume you were serious. See JDizzle's posts below; my 300 Ohm Sennheiser HD580's don't have a chance of being driven by an onboard solution - anything short of a breakout box won't cut it.

Nevermind the fact that a mobo is a terrible place for audio - EFI flying around all over the place, everything operating in the digital domain... onboard audio cards typically do not report their essential stats (freq response, S/N ratio, THD, IMD, dynamic range, max output) because they are so dismal. (See: Bose, but that's another discussion).

Anybody that wants anything approaching 'decent' quality out of integrated sound is dreaming. PCI cards are an improvement, but offboard DACs are the best.


Moving on to GPUs - dunno if you've noticed, but the topography of a GPU is wildly different than a CPU. Ever run a test like 3DMark? One of the tests shuts off the GPU and lets the CPU take over - the framerate drops from "smooth" to about 1 fps. CPU's are not massively parallel rendering engines and cannot fill that market.

Do some research/know what you're talking about before posting.