They might find that a market segment doesn't do a lot of playing 3D games, but does spend a lot of time watching Youtube on battery, and so make the decision to drop integrated GPU shader cores and dedicate more die area to video decoding, to make energy efficiency better when watching video.

> I'd hope this could be measured without collecting a ton of personal data.

Intel's claim is that they don't: "we would like your permission to collect [...] The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself" also the privacy safeguarding statement at the top of the page.

The whole purpose of CIP is to gather data on actual users' computing needs. For many computer users, the web is most of their computing experience -- it seems appropriate therefore to include usage of the web in the program.

Much like any customer experience study, privacy is an issue. Intel do at least claim to be mitigating the impact to privacy.

And besides, FPGAs are used for web scale applications, many of them applicable to small computers.

> what data is collected and how is it used?

> The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself

> If I participate in the program, is there any personal information in the data collected?

> Will not include the URL (web address) for specific sites visited

edit: also the knee-jerk reaction most people are going to have to this, is concern about certain categories of websites.

From a technical perspective, how does this work? I can only think of two ways:

(1) Intel downloads a big "map" file containing a huge list of pre-defined domains and categories. This means either the categories are pretty slim or you have a GB's big file

(2) Each URL is sent to Intel (aka "collected"). Maybe they don't "store" it ("We promise") but as soon as it leaves your system you have no control on this

There is probably some flaw with this method... curious if others think there's a "safe enough" way to do something like this...

And intel want it for free