Friday, December 31, 2010

Intels next-gen Ivy Bridge sports onboard GPU memory


Intels Sandy Bridge is days away from launch, but the big news this week is the massive changes to the next generation Ivy Bridge. If Intel manages to get their drivers in order, it could destroy the entire low end GPU market.

OK, lets be realistic, Intel won't get their drivers in order, five years in they are still irrevocably broken, but Ivy Bridge will change the game on the hardware side. Ivy will give a massive speed boost to the GPU side of things through the most unlikely of places, chip packaging technology. The big secret for Ivy Bridge is a silicon interposer coupled with lots and lots of DRAM under the thermal cap.

How much memory? Rumors from the far east say that the high end SKUs might carry as much as 1GB of GPU memory on board, not very fast, but it will probably be hugely wide. The magic of this all is in the silicon interposer(SI), and stacked memory. When AMD finds out, they are going to be very scared, so don't tell them.


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