3 ms·

I'm kinda in the same boat. I want a laptop with Iris Pro 580/p580 and NO dedicated GPU. The 580 has a bit over a TFLOP of compute (plenty for games like DoTA)

by hajile 10y ago

I'm kinda in the same boat. I want a laptop with Iris Pro 580/p580 and NO dedicated GPU. The 580 has a bit over a TFLOP of compute (plenty for games like DoTA) and more importantly, the drivers don't suck on Linux. The issue is that any laptop that ships with that processor also ships with a crappy dedicated GPU. When I have a 45w processor, I want to pay a few hundred extra for a 55w Nvidia M2000m that has 10% more compute power (granted, more efficient at GPGPU) and horrible drivers. What I want: 15.6", i7-6770HQ, 32gb DDR4, M.2 SSD, high-res IPS screen, Thinkpad-grade keyboard, good webcam, decent ports (At least 2x thunderbolt, 3x usb3, SD, 3.5mm, and ethernet), a little thicker for a battery that lasts a couple days, durable build quality, large trackpad with builtin wacom, NO dedicated graphics. I guess that's too much to ask.

sliken 10y ago
I think intel's pricing the iris graphics a bit too high, so it's pretty rare. Lenovo has some idea pads with iris, and the macbook pro. Hopefully they drop the price enough to make it more popular. As you mention it's a particularly attractive option for linux.
sliken 10y ago
Speaking of which, seems like the 580/P580 never really delivered on the promised performance compared to the much lower power Iris 540/550 (used in the macbook pro). The next gen looks promising though. Intel's already mentioned the kaby lake + iris for the NUC in Feb/March. I'm hoping that intel tunes the performance, power use, and price so it makes it into more devices. Iris graphics on laptops is pretty rare so far.
zanny 10y ago
I think there is a bit of a meme that Linux Intel graphics don't suck. They have broken desktops repeatedly and still have a lot of glitches on newer hardware, whereas everyone calls AMD bad but I haven't had a bad experience on their Mesa stack in over 5 years. Its generally that Intel is buggy / edge case broken and AMD is rock solid if not patching Windows drivers in performance. Albeit, I am biased, in that I intentionally avoid bleeding edge GPU hardware in general anywhere I can, but its hard to avoid Intel's latest because each year all the NUCs / notebooks / desktop platform switch to their latest CPUs. With AMD, since they have basically no market presence anywhere, I can get away with buying a 290 a year after it comes out for $240 and then having a great out of the box experience with it, whereas my 740SU notebook 4 years ago was only 6 months new when I got one and had massive Haswell GPU bugs on latest Mesa for about 6 months after buying it. But even then, Intel and AMD are pretty much par for support times and when you should expect good stability in my experiences, but everyone memes AMD as being trash while Intel is the savior of consumer Linux.
- sliken 10y ago
  I bought a NUC with the Iris 540, ran ubuntu 16.04 on it and I'm quite pleased with it. Minecraft, full screen youtube, full screen netflix, random web games like slither.io, random "rich" websites, webGL particle/water demos, etc all "just work". I've had way less problems with intel than I did with my radeons. Not sure I'd say better than nvidia (who has a pretty good binary blob driver), but similar. Even weird edge cases like rotating a display into portrait mode while logged in worked fine. It's not a GTX 1070 killer, but it's quite a nice upgrade from other Intel GPUs. It runs a fair variety of 2d/3d stuff at 1080P quite comfortably.
iSnow 10y ago
You won't find all the features in one machine, but the Dell XPS 9550 is also sold in a version without dedicated GPU.
dijit 10y ago
Look at the Dell Precision 5510, you can get it without the GPU and with a larger battery instead of a SATA drive. Has M.2 and all the other things you mentioned.

by hajile 10y ago

sliken 10y ago

I think intel's pricing the iris graphics a bit too high, so it's pretty rare. Lenovo has some idea pads with iris, and the macbook pro. Hopefully they drop the price enough to make it more popular. As you mention it's a particularly attractive option for linux.

sliken 10y ago

Speaking of which, seems like the 580/P580 never really delivered on the promised performance compared to the much lower power Iris 540/550 (used in the macbook pro). The next gen looks promising though. Intel's already mentioned the kaby lake + iris for the NUC in Feb/March. I'm hoping that intel tunes the performance, power use, and price so it makes it into more devices. Iris graphics on laptops is pretty rare so far.

zanny 10y ago

I think there is a bit of a meme that Linux Intel graphics don't suck. They have broken desktops repeatedly and still have a lot of glitches on newer hardware, whereas everyone calls AMD bad but I haven't had a bad experience on their Mesa stack in over 5 years. Its generally that Intel is buggy / edge case broken and AMD is rock solid if not patching Windows drivers in performance. Albeit, I am biased, in that I intentionally avoid bleeding edge GPU hardware in general anywhere I can, but its hard to avoid Intel's latest because each year all the NUCs / notebooks / desktop platform switch to their latest CPUs. With AMD, since they have basically no market presence anywhere, I can get away with buying a 290 a year after it comes out for $240 and then having a great out of the box experience with it, whereas my 740SU notebook 4 years ago was only 6 months new when I got one and had massive Haswell GPU bugs on latest Mesa for about 6 months after buying it. But even then, Intel and AMD are pretty much par for support times and when you should expect good stability in my experiences, but everyone memes AMD as being trash while Intel is the savior of consumer Linux.

sliken 10y ago
I bought a NUC with the Iris 540, ran ubuntu 16.04 on it and I'm quite pleased with it. Minecraft, full screen youtube, full screen netflix, random web games like slither.io, random "rich" websites, webGL particle/water demos, etc all "just work". I've had way less problems with intel than I did with my radeons. Not sure I'd say better than nvidia (who has a pretty good binary blob driver), but similar. Even weird edge cases like rotating a display into portrait mode while logged in worked fine. It's not a GTX 1070 killer, but it's quite a nice upgrade from other Intel GPUs. It runs a fair variety of 2d/3d stuff at 1080P quite comfortably.

iSnow 10y ago

You won't find all the features in one machine, but the Dell XPS 9550 is also sold in a version without dedicated GPU.

dijit 10y ago

Look at the Dell Precision 5510, you can get it without the GPU and with a larger battery instead of a SATA drive. Has M.2 and all the other things you mentioned.