And not on a Mac either. One of the most harmful myths in the laptop world is that the Graphic card This only matters if we’re talking about a gaming system. However, integrated graphics can be used for more than just displaying pretty graphics and can actually speed up the performance of some applications, which is crucial on office systems. low consumption.
When we talk about efficiency, we are not referring to raw power, but to the performance per watt produced by a particular hardware, either through a benchmark or by comparing application performance. Well, one of the things that integrated GPUs in mobile chips have in common is that they are much more efficient than those used by Intel and AMD. The reason? They use the Rendering tiles which is a type of GPU that is much more efficient in low-power, low-bandwidth environments.
Integrated GPUs for PC have been left behind
Many laptops have highly integrated components, which means the graphics card is on the same chip as the processor. Besides the fact that they share the same physical memory pool, this is a configuration that can be found in other embedded systems such as mobile phones. Well, in the case of the so-called iGPU, Intel never stood out above average in terms of performance, but on the other hand AMD did, in this they beat their rival by a landslide.
However, it’s not all good and good, mainly due to the fact that taking a gaming architecture, designed to run with hundreds of watts of power, and scaling it down isn’t exactly the paradigm of power efficiency. Those of Lisa Su reign alone on the said market due to a total absence of competition, but in low consumption they pale in performance per watt in front of the graphic architectures of the latest mobile chips.
One of the big mistakes, from our point of view, is that not all processors come with integrated graphics, because if they do, some algorithms could be moved from the processor to the graphics and speed up applications. This is something that has been done on mobile phones for quite some time with quite significant power efficiency results.
What is the most powerful integrated graphics card of the moment?
Let’s not miss the truth: when it comes to GPU power efficiency, Apple and Qualcomm chips far outperform their Intel and AMD counterparts, this being one of the hot topics in the x86 compatible world. For this reason, there are expected to be changes in the coming years due to the market trend of selling thinner and less power-consuming laptops.
For this we decided to measure the amount of TFLOPS per watt of different architectures:
- The GPU inside the Apple M2 chip achieves 3.6 TFLOPS of computing power under an average consumption of 22.6 W for the entire chip, or 0.16 TFLOPS per watt of consumption.
- If we go to the PC, we have that the RX 680M of the Ryzen 7 6800U reaches 3.38 TFLOPS with a consumption of 15 W, which represents 0.22 TFLOPS per watt of consumption. However, this does not match the 28W version of the chip in terms of raw performance and in this case the efficiency drops to 0.12 TFLOPS/W.
- Finally, we have the most powerful graphics processor of the moment, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 which reaches 2,138 TFLOPS with a consumption of 7.5 W, which allows it to reach 0.285 TFLOPS/W.
For this reason, the most efficient graphics card at present cannot be found on a PC, although it is clear that this does not mean that it is the most powerful, but it does mean that there are still a lot of work to do. in very low power computers, in which although they are not used for gaming, but their graphics processor is used to accelerate certain functions of many common applications and, therefore, an evolution in this direction is necessary.
