Haswell Considerably Ups Integrated Graphics Performance Over Ivy Bridge

Intel’s Ive Bridge range hasn’t even been released yet and we’re already getting detailed news about its successor, Haswell. There will be three distinct choices of 3D integrated graphics (IGP) performance: ultra low voltage parts for laptops/tablets offering up to GT3 integrated graphics; desktop GT2 graphics offering 20-50% more performance than Ivy Bridge. GT3 graphics should double or even triple the performance of IB graphics. It will offer powerful GPU compute capabilities, too. It looks like true 3D capable ultra thin computers could be a reality with this chip. Of course, this level of IGP performance is going to decimate sales of low end (and maybe even slightly better) discrete graphics cards from NVIDIA & AMD, but should leave the mid and high end market intact.

Also, it appears that Haswell will come in a Multi-Chip Module (MCM) not seen since the late 90’s with the Pentium 3. This will be used to house the level 4 cache, used to satisfy the huge bandwidth requirements of the CPU & GPU cores all processing data simultaneously.