Chinese-made GPU beats performance of 10-year-old integrated AMD graphics -
Lingjiu GP201 hits mass productionA new challenger has entered the battle for Chinese GPU and graphics card dominance. Lingjiu Microelectronics, creators of the brand-new GP201 graphics card, have apparently matched the performance of AMD's decade-old integrated GPU. The card can't be found on any U.S. shopping websites, yet, but IT Home reports it has begun mass-production and is available for purchase in China. Lingjiu's press deck shows incredible performance... when compared to the AMD E8860, an integrated graphics card from ten years ago. It's not going to topple the best graphics cards any time soon, in other words.
Lingjiu Microelectronics, a company so young it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia article, brings five models of their GP201 to market, in 2-slot, 1-slot, and MXM laptop form factors. The GP201 boasts a base clock of 1.2 GHz, single precision floating point performance of 1.2 TFLOPS, 2GB DDR4 VRAM, and power consumption of up to 30W. The card only communicates at PCIe 3.0 rates, but it does claim compatibility with most major Chinese processors and operating systems. The specs sheet also notes that the graphics card is "compatible with VESA" — presumably DisplayPort and AdaptiveSync, though it's not immediately clear which standard is meant.
If these numbers seem unimpressive, it's because they are. Nvidia's lowest-end release of 2017, the GT 1030, is commonly found on eBay for below $50 and matches the GP201 in clock speed, TFLOPS, and power consumption. And that's only on-paper specs — the GT 1030 uses mature Nvidia drivers, while Lingjiu is highly unlikely to match that level of tuning for many years (just ask Intel about GPU drivers). But in fairness to Lingjiu, it did succeed at getting a graphics card into production in only its third year of existence, while many previously-announced Chinese graphics cards died before ever reaching the market.
