<completely irrelevant thread - for hardware enthusiasts ONLY - you have been warned>

I've been using a thin and light for years now - a fanless N5000 (Pentium Silver) based laptop. It had sufficient punch (or let's call it "slap") in its HD 605 iGPU to let me play the likes of Quake 3, Freelancer or Jedi Academy @1280x1024 60Hz, which, if you think about it, is pretty impressive. Again, this is a fanless system.

The downside? 4GB of RAM. Soldered, as most 13.3" notebooks come with these days. And limited performance when I had to do the odd compilation while away from home (less of a problem these days, I admit).

So when I got a hefty 20% discount code from a local retailer, combined with a 15% coupon they were offering for electronics purchased over the weekend, I knew what I had to get. No, not a GPU. The prices are horrible. An upgrade thin-and-light 13.3"!

I went with a 8GB of RAM (still soldered, but enough for my purposes) i5-1135G7 based laptop, packing the slightly downsized (80 CU) variant of the new Iris Xe LP iGPU.

Don't get me wrong, I knew it was going to be quite a jump, but I've been playing Supreme Commander on this thing, maxed out @ 1080p. On Linux! Doesn't drop below 60fps, though I have not had any massive battles yet. DXVK seems to be using its full Vulkan potential (I get more frames than in Wine's OpenGL WineD3D), which was a problem with previous gen iGPUs from Intel.

Comparably, most reviews say it's on par with a MX250 Nvidia GPU, which is not mindblowing in terms of performance, but this is a 45W package combo of 4 core 8 thread 4.2Ghz CPU and iGPU with a barely audible fan. Just wow. I thought maybe I could play Torchlight 2, Civ IV on it and some other games that performed terribly on my previous netbook, but it's capable of so much more. Now I'm thinking maybe I'll need a bigger SSD for all the extra games...

Can't wait for the discrete GPUs from Intel, to be honest, after I've seen what this baby iGPU can do. Not that I'm going to buy one necessarily, but more competition in the space is welcome. And since Intel has open drivers in the Linux space, it's a win for us Linux users - we now have a potential alternative to increasingly overpriced AMD cards.

<end of completely irrelevant thread - for hardware enthusiasts ONLY>

Yes, the new Intel iGPU is quite a bump up in performance and so is the processor too. (The eight core models are coming in a couple of days by the way.) The HD 630 was not too shabby but the 605 was weak even when new.

Myself I would be happy if my minilaptop could manage videos and video meetings. Celeron = celery, a vegetable with taste but little substance.

I couldn't find head to head benchmarks but I think we can compare floating point performance. The Intel Iris Xe G7 80EU can do 1408 (FP32 Float) GFLOPs : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/iris-xe-graphics-g7-80eu.c3678 while an MX250 of comparable power draw seems to be able to output 797 GFLOPs : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-mx250.c3354 . The higher clocked MX250 with 25W power draw can do 1215 GFLOPs : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-mx250.c3353 .

So it seems like Intel already has a winner on its hands. Competition is sorely needed now that both red and green teams have settled into the comfortable seller's market that covid and subsequent chip shortage has created and no GPU can be found at a price that gives it value for money. Hopefully Intel utilizes the lack of competition in the budget segment (which seems to have been dominated by the GT1030 for years) and AMD withholding newer Zen APUs to finally get some market share and push the other two into making something competent.

Yes, that's true, however:
- most games you can play on it at decent framerates are not CPU intensive anyway (nor should they hit any memory limits, though with even beefier iGPUs that may come in the future, I guess 16GB of RAM would not hurt)

Edit: Now that I think of it, I should try playing Anno 1404, see how that goes. I have a feeling I'll not be able to max it out.

- the CPU will hit its boost limit pretty quickly and throttle down close to its base clock. It's not really designed to boost continuously in a laptop configuration, as I'm sure it would thermal throttle in a few minutes (at least on my single fan thin-and-light)
- the GPU is very unlikely to thermal throttle, so if the package is kept at decent temps, it will boost all it can continuously

I have actually gone and soft-disabled turbo boost anyway, and now I can barely hear the fan even when playing something more serious like Sins of a Solar Empire. If better power efficiency is what you are after (I do not care that much tbh, if I can get more than 4h out of it), you should probably wait for Alder Lake and the Little-Big Intel shift on mobile. I think it's good they are picking up what ARM has been doing for ages. Laptops lasting more than a full day in light workloads will soon be a thing. It had an M.2 SSD slot, so that was not a problem. And no, I've been on Linux pretty much exclusively for a while now - one of the benefits is that it only eats up about 600-700MB of RAM, which gives you more space for the important stuff: things you want to run on it :P. Before that I had a Bay Trail HD Graphics powered laptop :). Compared to that, it was as big of a leap as the G7 Iris Xe LP is compared to it now.

Here they are... As I expected, no room for a big GPU with all those extra cores, so they have the 32CU variant of Xe LP, marketed as UHD Graphics.

Linux Mint RAM usage increased by 50% between v19.3 and 20.1. I do not know about v20.0 as I did not happen to check.

These iGPUs are getting quite impressive, their low power draw considered.

May I ask why you went with an Intel chip over a Ryzen model? Thunderbolt support?

I assume you're referring to the main Cinnamon-based edition? I'm running MATE and it's pretty much where it's always been. I actually found out about the Thunderbolt support after the purchase, but I admit it's a nice to have. No, it was mainly down to availability and price.

Modified MATE here. From 387M to near 700M. I might go ahead and throw out MATE.

I'm not really impressed by Intel because they're still just playing catch-up to AMD's APUs. I'm still a bit baffled that the latter don't exist for their desktop CPUs. It's always good to have something to fall back on should one's regular GPU be on the fritz.

Performance-wise Apple's new chips still eat both of their lunches though. *shrug*

lol , and there here goes.. in need of another drive! be sure to get one big enough

My MATE's never eaten less than 500MB (sounds like something somebody would say in a bar).

True. And also true about AMD. I've seen Vega cores in action and they do pack a punch - though that seems to reflect negatively on thermals as well.

I was exaggerating :P. Still have plenty of space for the moment on my 512GB SSD.

The M1 is amazing, yes.
When I returned a Macbook Air M1 that I'd been testing, I seriously considered buying one myself.
But I wasn't sure Apple could be trusted to keep maintaining Rosetta, so I looked around for Windows options and ended up with a Ryzen 7 4700u based HP Envy 13" convertible.
The 4700u gets close enough to the M1 that I can't tell the difference now that I can't compare them side by side.
And I can run the Windows and Linux programs that the M1 can't properly handle, so I don't need to worry on that front.

Of course, I'm not going to run CP2077 on this thing, but games like Shadow Tactics and Anno 1404 (neither of which worked on the Macbook) run with all graphics settings maxed out.
After some minutes of play at these settings, the fan does start, but never gets loud.
I leave the power settings at "HP Recommended" which is, AFAIK, quite conservative with how much power it lets the CPU sip. That way the fan stays off for most loads and quiet for the mentioned games at max settings.

If the M1 officially ran Linux and Rosetta could be trusted to remain maintained (open sourced, even), I think I'd have gone with the Macbook. But I really want my Intel-centric stuff to just work.

So that's on a RX Vega 7 iGPU... you're maxing out Anno 1404 at 1080p?

It would be good news for me as well, as the graphics performance seems comparable to the Xe line.

Edit: I'm so curios to see how it goes, that I'm installing it now :P.

Update: It's kind of rough @1080p when I fully zoom out (get around 40fps), so I'll stick with 1360x768. Which is what I probably would have done away due to how impossible to read the Anno UI is on smaller screens.

It could be that it would have worked better on Windows, who knows.