Llano IGP vs SNB IGP vs IVB IGP

I just think that Phenom II X4 is not such a great value compared to Athlon II X4 because PII is really not that much faster and it is considerably slower than the Core i5/i7 chips.

But the X6 is a pretty great value if you can use all those cores. X6 has Turbo too so it's not bad for even less threaded tasks. Intel wants some serious money for their 6 core whereas poor AMD is shipping theirs under $200 (can't be making much money there.)

 

Are you sure DX9 requires a graphics card's memory to be replicated? That doesn't seem right.

 

yeah
the delta between highend and lowend is so thin that if i'm going to build a pc now i would go for phenom and a 65XX video card for better performance and about the same price
at the moment the problem for an allrange offer is the cpu clock, at least for me

 

the phenom 955BE has dropped in price, down to 99 euros. its clock multiplier is still unlocked. so you can still reasonably buy one.

for value the X3 would be the better one, as it turns into an X4 with a BIOS setting, and even if it doesn't work you have the gaming needs mostly covered

 

Techreport review of llano is up for those interested.

 

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=22002

Intel claims it will match today's discrete graphics with Haswell. I am guessing they are shooting for 6450 level of performance.

 

I don't know, they also said "12× improvement in 2015"… I think they clearly intend to take it up a notch, but do they hope to match AMD?

 

That statement is very very vague obviously (since "today" discrete graphics would include everything from HD5450 to GTX 580). If they are shooting for HD5450 level performance, they can do that today (pretty much).
I think though Haswell aiming just for 6450 performance is a bit low. Ok depends if you're talking review-edition 6450 or for-sale-edition 6450 (quite a difference there) but given the timeframe I can't see why intel wouldn't aim for a bit more (something about as fast as Llano). Ivy Bridge might be enough already to match hd6450 ddr3.

 

Maybe they should first begin with filtering ?

from http://techreport.com/articles.x/21099/11

 

Considering Intel's iGPU progress and 22nm shrink, IMO they are targeting ~6650 performance, which still would be pretty decent.

By that time AMD will have APU with GCN generation. There are also similarities between Haswell and GCN, like vector/scalar design.

 

Granted that's cheap. But hey at least no obvious brilinear cheating .
If you compare that to amd's past efforts, it's worse than r300 (higher angle dependency). It is better than r200 though, which had the same angle dependency but could do AF only with bilinear filtering...
I can understand intel though there, most people probably still don't care all that much about AF, so they used a cheap implementation, and I believe it's the same since the original Gen X chipset (i965). AF is also a patent mess, so maybe that implementation avoids some of it. I won't argue though that it's probably time for a better algorithm, wouldn't surprise me if it got improved a bit in Ivy Bridge or Haswell.

 

This is what my X850 puts out. I ran this a few months ago.
0 - 16X AF.




The more distressing aspect to TR's comparison was the in-game shot with a clear loss of detail on the Intel IGP. He also mentions some dithering/filtering artifacts. Intel is just skimping on quality, surely because it costs transistors. In the grand scheme I suppose their hardware does get the job done though.

 

The vector/scalar design is upto them. But 66xx level perf in 2013 isn't exactly acceptable, considering AMD's graphics.

Matching AMD's hypothetical 86xx is plainly impossible without some kind of on package dram.

 

Pretty much? Intel HD 3000 beats HD 5450 performance today. And i expect Ivy bridge will be at least 50% faster. Ivy bridge will definitely be faster than 6450 and close to Llano performance already. If they really want to up the ante they could double the performance from Ivy bridge to Haswell (similar to how performance doubled from Arrandale to Sandy Bridge)

 

IB increases the EUs by 33%. While clocks are likely to be more as well, it appears that Intel does not intend to increase it's IGP performance beyond what moore's law already provides.

In this context, Intel's claim of 7x better graphics by Haswell sounds dubious.

Besides, IB's competitor is not Llano, it is trinity. Which will not have a lame CPU, hopefully.

 

Yep my 50 % estimate was considering the 33% increase in EU's and say 15-20% increase in clocks(possibly also greater perf/EU as they're going for DX11 compliance as well).

Have Intel publicly mentioned that they're targeting 7x over SB? I havent come across that anywhere

I expect Llano will still be competing with IB for at least a quarter. I dont expect Trinity to be out until late Q2. IB is slated to be out in early Q2 as per the latest roadmap. And given how slow AMD have been to ramp up Llano, it remains to be seen how fast they can ramp up Trinity production. Yes the CPU performance will be far better hopefully, and with better clocks as the process matures

 

Re: ramping up on AMD side. With Llano GF was fighting with new process for them as well as AMD designers were fighting with porting GPU logic from TSMC bulk to GF SOI with Gate First.
Path for Trinity will be a lot easier because they are staying on 32nm SOI for it. AMD already have working silicon in their labs for some time. Last year this time I doubt AMD had working Llano in their labs.

 

Maybe I'm wrong but I think they weren't talking about the Graphics Core.
They meant the CPU performance for Vector Floating Point will exceed the performance of current discrete graphics cards.
Add that to the inherit advantages of CPU's and you'll get the best platform for the scenarios they mentioned (scientific and engineering numerical applications, visual processing, recognition, data-mining/synthesis, gaming, physics, cryptography and other areas of applications).

 

Isn't Ivy Bridge supposed to double EU count?

Anyway, I imagine Intel intends to stack some DRAM on their APUs…

 

That depends, my impression was it was about the same performance overall.

50% faster is not enough to beat 6450 (well not the review edition). It is enough to beat the 6450 ddr3 however.
That would be close to the lower-end Llanos but not quite up there with the 400 SP versions.