Select Haswell parts will feature Intel's supercharged Iris graphics.
If you ask an everyday gamer, he'll probably tell you the PC graphics market is basically a two-horse race between AMD's Radeon and Nvidia's GeForce. Ask a financial analyst and you'll get a different answer: the beancounters think that the graphics market is less of a race and more of a massacre, with Intel playing the role of Leatherface and Ivy Bridge's integrated graphics acting as the chainsaw that delivers the death blow.
They say two heads are better than one, but in processors with integrated graphics -- think Intel's Sandy Bridge or AMD's APUs -- the GPU and CPU actually do very little communicating. For the most part, the GPU does its thing while the CPU knocks about on something else. There has to be something better! And as it turns out, there is: a group of researchers from North Carolina State University recently coaxed CPUs and GPUs on integrated processors into helping each other out, and they report a performance boost of over 20 percent as a result.
Intel's all-in with its Sandy Bridge platform, and AMD would rather talk about its Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) than anything else. And if you're building a rig for your mom and pop for Christmas (or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or just in general), you're probably eying up one of these two platforms and won't consider a discrete GPU. Scenarios like this one might help explain why discrete GPU shipments are down.
AMD currently has two Llano desktop APUs on the market, with four more chips scheduled for release later this year. A product roadmap recently discovered inside MSI marketing material has already shed light on three of the four upcoming chips. As for the fourth one, our friends over at Fudzilla now claim to have all the details.
MSI dabbles in both motherboards and graphics cards (as well as other components and products), and maybe that gives them an advantage when it comes to building boards for AMD's upcoming Fusion processors. Whether or not that's the case, MSI isn't bashful about laying claim to the "world's fastest mainboard with integrated graphics," the newly released A75MA-G55 built around AMD's FM1 socket.
-
Technology
Entertainment
-
Music
-
Creative
Sport & Auto
- About Future
- Jobs
- News
- Advertising
- Digital Future
- Privacy Policy
- Cookies Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Shop
- Investor Relations
- Contact Future
© Future US, Inc. 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, California, 94080. All Rights Reserved.