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Intel's Sandy Bridge to Deliver 2% of AMD's Top Graphics Performance
- Aron 16y agoIt's a logical direction for Intel to take. They are continuing to ramp up transistor counts via process shrinks, but the value of multiplying cores is weak for the consumer right now, so it makes sense to pull in whatever other more specialized functions they can manage. This trend doesn't kill or even significantly maim Nvidia, but it weakens their < 50$ segment.
- Tamerlin 16y agoI suspect that Intel is also intent on entering the high end GPU market. The margins in mainstream processors are decreasing, and the new ARM cores aren't going to help with that. Margins on high-end GPU's on the other hand are quite high. The first Larabee processor probably won't be much of a competitor to AMD's and nVidia's GPU's in graphics, but that's just the first generation... who knows what they'll pull off in the second? (Of course, that could also end up being crap. Intel's history with GPU's isn't exactly examplary...)
- acqq 16y agoThere's one obvious reason for the difference: AMD's top graphics card needs up to 300W alone (not counting the CPU power). http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5970/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-5970-overview.aspx http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-h... The maximum TDP for the Sandy Bridge (for CPU and GPU together!) is 95W: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/intels-sandy-bridge-architecture-exposed http://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/intels-sandy-bridge-archi... And there are of course many additional trade-offs once you design for the limited power consumption and overall complexity of the chip.