[TriLUG] text damage using Intel video

[Kevin Hunter]

At 12:44am -0400 Wed, 27 Jun 2012, Joseph S. Tate wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 9:19 PM, David Both wrote:
>> I have had some trouble with the Intel on-chip video, and sometimes
>> the on-motherboard video as well.
>
> Intel graphics, it's on-mobo.  What does "on-chip video" mean?

Historically, there were two avenues for offloading graphical 
calculations to a dedicated chip: a cheap on-mobo solution, or buying a 
dedicated add-on card.  The add-on cards were generally leaps and bounds 
more powerful than the cheap on-mobo solutions.

Recently, Moore's law has allowed CPU designers to fit so many 
transistors on the chip die, that it has apparently become desirable to 
use some of the now-available silicon real-estate for other things, like 
graphics processing.  The perceived advantage to this scheme is that the 
transfer of information between CPU and GPU is mucho faster because now 
the GPU is literally on the same chip as the CPU, eliding the need to 
transfer data over the (relative) bottleneck that is the bus.  Indeed, 
the CPU+GPU combination on the same die I'm now given to understand can 
hand my current 4+ year old low-end graphics card it's lunch.

I haven't yet interacted with one, so I don't quite know how the 
connection works.  That is, my layman's understanding was that whatever 
did the processing, supplied the output medium for the monitor (i.e. 
VGA/DVI connection).  I'm guessing there's still some plumbing required 
on the mobo for this setup.

Cheers,

Kevin