Eventually, high-end consumers are meant to buy Sandy Bridge-E on the LGA2011 platform. The vast majority of LGA1155 users are going to use that integrated gpu

Eventually, high-end consumers are meant to buy Sandy Bridge-E on the LGA2011 platform. The vast majority of LGA1155 users are going to use that integrated gpu. Producing it as a separate chip would be much more expensive -- on-die it can share expensive resources, notably the memory controller, and moving it away from the chipset means there only has to be one high-performing piece of silicon in the whole system. Using a quarter more die does not mean that the cpu is a quarter more expensive -- the fabrication costs are a minuscule amount of the sale price, and if this move allows Intel to reduce the total amount of different high-performing chips made, it could well result in a reduction of total costs, potentially making the CPU less expensive -- even to people who do not use the integrated GPU.