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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2006-03-12, 11:42

"Integrated graphics" refers to having graphics implemented as part of the chipset, as opposed to having a separate chip (or chip on a separated card based on e.g. AGP or PCI Express) dedicated exclusively to graphics.

This is not inherently bad. It has, however, two implications.
1) An implementation of integrated graphics is usually very low-end and simple. Integrated graphics chips are generally targeted for office use; any graphics chip will be more than good enough for that, so the line of thinking is to implement very little technology at all. This makes them cheap and still good enough. For higher-end uses, however, it becomes problematic. Most specifically games, which have (for years) been on the bleeding edge of graphics technology, but also for high-end graphics and video work, e.g. Apple Motion, and, to a lesser extent, even applications for iLife, such as iMovie, not to mention the general OS. Quartz Extreme, Quartz 2D Extreme, Core Image and Core Video all benefit from graphics chip acceleration (whereas QE and Q2DE will be disabled entirely without the availability of such, CI and CV will merely be throttled to a simpler mode). In the long run, this means that even for everyday work, you could benefit from a somewhat modern graphics chip.

2) Integrated graphics often (but not always) are further simplified by sharing their RAM with the RAM used by the CPU. Sometimes a hybrid approach is taken, which ATi calls HyperMemory and nVidia calls TurboCache (yay for euphemistic marketing). But even then, a significant portion of the RAM is not dedicated to the graphics. This is primarily a latency, and secondarily a bandwidth problem. In other words, because of the longer path that needs to be taken to store and retrieve graphics information between RAM and graphics chip, the chip can't actually run at its full potential performance.

The Intel Mac mini is the first time in many, many years that Apple has used integrated graphics. This created a bit of an outcry simply out of principle, but in practice, it isn't necessarily a big deal, as the Mac mini was always supposed to be a very-low-end machine anyway. It isn't intended for any kind of work that would require (or greatly benefit from) a dedicated graphics chip.

Hope that helps.
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