Intel Haswell iGPU, 300% Ivy Bridge Performance

More and more information about Intel’s Haswell is surfacing the internet and most of it is detailing and debating the most impressive unit inside Intel’s new architecture, the integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU).

Haswell’s iGPU is an almost complete revolution when compared with what we have today inside Ivy Bridge. The world’s largest semiconductor company is finally taking 3D graphics and GPU compute seriously. The truth is that Intel needs to do this. While for the past decade all the world’s supercomputers got along just fine with no powerful GPUs inside, nowadays it seems unimaginable to pass up that tremendous efficiency and performance. Therefore, Intel is hard at work with its Xeon Phi accelerator cards. 3D graphics and GPU compute is becoming essential for desktop PCs too as there are big software companies like Adobe that have completely committed to GPU compute and even declared that they won’t make a non-GPU compute enabled version ever.

All Adobe’s software suites will need to be installed on computers with graphics cards or APUs that have GPU compute capabilities. Therefore, Intel knows that it can’t ignore 3D graphics and GPU performance anymore. AMD and Nvidia might not be too happy that a third serious 3D competitor will evolve in the market, but both companies have so much experience with 3D graphics that they’ll simply make even more powerful chips. Fudzilla.com stumbled upon some interesting info that reportedly estimates Haswell’s 3D performance as being three times better than it is on Ivy Bridge.

Intel is fitting the new top iGPU with 40 execution units, 160 ALU and 4 texture units. Comparing this to Ivy Bridge’s 16 execution units, 64 ALUs and 2 texturing units will only help us understand the magnitude of the performance improvement. We still believe the performance improvement will be around 400%, but even 300% is not less than amazing.

Intel Haswell CPU
Image credits to Intel

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