Tomorrow my local Microsoft store is hosting an event to show off the new Surface hardware, and it's my first chance to check out the Surface Book in person.
I have a first-gen Surface Pro, and it's really pretty long in the tooth. All summer I have been waiting for the Pro 4. Then Microsoft dropped the Surface Book, and right away I thought it was a better (albeit more expensive) choice for me. Still, sites on the web are questioning Microsoft's lack of transparency on hardware and claimed "verified" benchmark performance, and I am left wondering just what I would be getting for all those extra Benjamins.
So my current thought is that Microsoft is being cagy about how they are squeezing that performance out of the hardware. I remember Panos Panay talking about how their Xbox engineers know how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the hardware, and it occurred to me that back in the summer there was talk that DirectX12 would include a feature called Multiadapter that would allow developers to utilize the otherwise dormant integrated Intel graphics as well as a discrete GPU for extra performance.
Obviously, the Integrated Intel Iris 6100 integrated GPU would be driving the tablet in "clipboard mode," but what if the Surface book was utilizing both the Intel and the discrete NVidia GPUs in draw and laptop modes? Would that allow Microsoft to "game the system" with benchmarks designed around DirectX12, or could Multiadapter find enough support that this will be a mainstream feature?
Finally, would that technology translate to productivity-based GPU-intensive activities like video rendering, or are Surface Book's performance claims simply too good to be true?
I have a first-gen Surface Pro, and it's really pretty long in the tooth. All summer I have been waiting for the Pro 4. Then Microsoft dropped the Surface Book, and right away I thought it was a better (albeit more expensive) choice for me. Still, sites on the web are questioning Microsoft's lack of transparency on hardware and claimed "verified" benchmark performance, and I am left wondering just what I would be getting for all those extra Benjamins.
So my current thought is that Microsoft is being cagy about how they are squeezing that performance out of the hardware. I remember Panos Panay talking about how their Xbox engineers know how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the hardware, and it occurred to me that back in the summer there was talk that DirectX12 would include a feature called Multiadapter that would allow developers to utilize the otherwise dormant integrated Intel graphics as well as a discrete GPU for extra performance.
Obviously, the Integrated Intel Iris 6100 integrated GPU would be driving the tablet in "clipboard mode," but what if the Surface book was utilizing both the Intel and the discrete NVidia GPUs in draw and laptop modes? Would that allow Microsoft to "game the system" with benchmarks designed around DirectX12, or could Multiadapter find enough support that this will be a mainstream feature?
Finally, would that technology translate to productivity-based GPU-intensive activities like video rendering, or are Surface Book's performance claims simply too good to be true?
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