It has a VGA port and what seems to be a verrry modest video system. However, it also has two PCIe3 ×16s, so presumably you can use your own GPU, if the software support is there. There doesn't seem to be an integrated GPU in the AMD dev kit http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/s... either, so presumably there is Linux ARM PCI GPU support out there, unless everyone is just SSHing in?
It's not so bad to not have a GPU at all (though given that ARM owns Mali and you're licensing from ARM anyway, it seems prudent to have one if you can). The real problem is not being able to use the hardware that is there due to driver issues.
The GPU is still an ARM Mali T6xx which is mostly unsupported, i.e. removing Chrome OS and running "pure" linux is going to be dreadfully slow for lack of 2D/3D acceleration. It's a shame that ARM hasn't released any technical datasheets for their Mali GPUs.
It really does need a GPU. Tried it on a laptop with integrated graphics and it crashed completely. Didn't even give a BSOD, machine just went dead and rebooted.
Well there's an integrated GPU sure - it does 'technically have a real gpu'.
But there no options for CUDA applications, and no options for similar applications on the AMD side. Depending on your use case, the iGPU might not be powerful enough for your needs even without ML programs if you have multiple monitors (and one is 4k).
I have a Dell Inspiron 7000 which has a discrete GPU (GTX 1050Ti).. Once it runs, it runs very well, but being somewhat newer to Linux it was a big hassle which wasn't settled easily.
If it is in fact a CPU designed to be used like a GPU, that’d be very akin to Intel’s (dead) Project Larabee.[0] As I understand it, it was supposed to be a GPGPU[a] that internally was just an x86-64 processor with massive vector units. So, in theory, one could offload practically an entire game onto a Larabee card (save for IO probably) and do computations there. Compare that to a GPU where computations must be sent back and forth between the CPU and GPU.
Linus Sebastion (of LinusTechTips) managed to get his hands on one and made a video on it.[1] It’s been a while since I’ve seen the video, but, IIRC, they weren’t able to get it to work, so the video was a bit of a letdown.
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