wow. bobcat's graphics power is the equivalent of a 5450 which is almost as fast as core i5 2400. most of the power from the 5450 is not the actual chip otherwise a 5870 would consume >400 watts. the problem with these low power cards is that most of the power (and cost) is VRAM and PCB components. the chip itself is probably mostly PCI and IO logic which is wasteful in terms of die area/power. when integrated on die this problem disappears.

comparing the 45nm graphics chip on clarkdale to sandy b has revealed some interesting information. sandy bridge has custom designed parts where as the 45nm gfx chip has none for the core. also out of 124mm2, 50mm2 of the clarkdale gfx chip is I/O, the other 75mm2 is for core logic, out of that 53mm2 is for gfx. the graphics core in sandy bridge is ~38mm2.


i highlighted any structure (for SB) that has been custom designed. note the SRAM arrays in the top. there are 12 large ones with 8 structures each.

it's ~ 9mmx5mm with pads on one side and some other logic which is approximately 7 mm2.