Quote Originally Posted by Manicdan View Post
i dont think SB did a very good job with their GPU honestly.

looking at the IGP vs best gpu across time
we got 40SPs back when 800SPs was the max for ati cards, so 1/20 ratio.
this gpu is about the same as 80SP, and it will be double that with their 2C version so around 160SPs,
and when its due, we should see new ATI cards stronger then the current which is already at 1600SPs, which puts the SB gpu under 1/10th of max

basically what im saying is that while SB might beat out all IGPs, those havnt changed much in the last 3 years anyway, and this is going to be as weak as an IGP in 2011. SB will have no purpose being in a miniITX sized case, claiming to be a gaming PC, while Llano will have that ability.
Thats not a big deal to copy-paste additional gpu cores on the die, but the target segment for such solution is small to none. It would be costly (because of the large die size), it would suck power like a mad (forget notebooks segment...), it would be slower then similar discrete solution (because of memory lmitation) e.t.c. Current SB IGP looks like good trade-off. Let see what AMD will bring to the table...
And after all SB is a first cpu which fully shares mem subsystem (including L3) with IGP. If Intel decide to implement OpenCL for its igp then cpu core <-> igp data interchange would be superfast. Also I still hope Intel will implement better support for software shader/vertex processing in its drivers. After all AVX has 200 SP GFLOP/s of computing power (twice of ATI HD 5450) and shared L3 can help a lot in this case.