News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 1, 2006

hardware

Open mouth, insert foot

Posted Mar. 1, ’06, 5:51 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Hardware

Mac mini Want to look back at a better time when Apple picked on PC manufacturers for using integrated graphics instead of a dedicated card (with its own memory)? Look no further. From the page:

Your Mac mini uses its dedicated graphics chip to offload visual tasks from the main CPU. So the G4 processor doesn’t have to worry about layering windows, moving them around, scrolling through web pages or worse, figuring out the pattern umpteen laser beams make when reflected off a shielded spaceship during combat. The Radeon 9200 takes care of all that, and does a better job than a general purpose CPU since it’s designed especially for such tasks. Even better, the Radeon 9200 gets to use 32MB of dedicated memory, which lets the G4 processor use all of its RAM for other tasks. That means you can run many more programs at once.

sigh I hope this is temporary because other than that, I love the new Mac minis.

[via Digg]


2 Comments

Greg said:

I wanted to first cry when I saw "Intel Integrated Graphics." Then my hopes got up, because I thought, "OOH! Small scale server!!!" Then I cried again, remembering OS X Server only runs on PPC Macs right now.

March 1, 2006 10:02 PM
Grant Schenk said:

Go ahead, just try to play Halo on a budget PC. Most say they’re good for 2D games only. That’s because an “integrated Intel graphics” chip steals power from the CPU and siphons off memory from system-level RAM. You’d have to buy an extra card to get the graphics performance of Mac mini, and some cheaper PCs don’t even have an open slot to let you add one.

March 2, 2006 3:00 AM

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