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Early Ivy Bridge Benchmark: Graphics Performance Greatly Improved
The folks over at Anandtech managed to spend some time with early Ivy bridge production samples and perform a few benchmarks. The skinny: CPU performance is mildly increased as expected, but the GPU is 20-50% faster than the Sandy Bridge GPU. Power consumption is also down about 30W under full load. The graphics, however, are still slower than AMD's Llano (but the Ivy Bridge CPU beats the pants off of the Fusion's). Is the tradeoff worth it?
It isn't meant to be powerful graphics. It isn't a "tradeoff". Intel's HD graphics are meant to be very low power, but competent enough to run basics, shiny OS features at least. That they do, and it sounds like IB is even better at that. But it isn't a "tradeoff" to get a good CPU with basic graphics that is called "normal". If you need good graphics discrete is still the way to go and there are plenty of reasonable options.
From the look of it, Ivy Bridge is quite a win. Sandy Bridge, but a bit better. Nothing not to like there.
The main reason that integrated GPU performance matters(aside from the fact that it is all the GPU you get in any too-cheap or too-skinny device that doesn't have a discrete option) is that it defines the (overwhelmingly common) baseline for what 'PC graphics' means. If that situation is uniformly awful, GPU intensive stuff will continue to be fairly niche, which leads to a chicken-and-egg issue: if integrated graphics suck, the market for GPU intensive stuff will be constrained, which will reduce the incentive to improve GPU performance, and so it goes...
Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.
I guess that's simply a chip without an integrated GPU. Here's a picture of a Sandy Bridge Core i7 with GPU.
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