14 DAY TRIAL // It wasn't until Ivy Bridge that Intel's integrated graphics processors (iGPs) really became good enough to allow desktops and laptops to make do without add-in boards, and now it seems that things are getting even better.
Intel has been developing a new iGP, called GT3 or Iris Pro. This chip will be included in the Broadwell line of central processing units.
We've now learned that the first (or are they?) commercially available Broadwell chips will be high-end Broadwell-K with support for LGA 1150 9-Series Z97 and H97 chipsets.
Only the Z97 will actually let them work at their best though, since Intel has decided that only the best chipsets should support unlocked multipliers (overclocking).
Anyway, that's not the main topic of discussion here. The real news, or rather new rumor, is that the Iris Pro GT3 will boost graphics performance by 80% compared to the one in current-generation Ivy Bridge processors.
It sounds amazing and unbelievable, but that's what you get when you receive an iGP with 128 MB of eDRAM memory. There will be some speed improvements to transcoding and Quick sync technologies too.
As for the actually x86 cores, there will be four of them, backed by 6 MB of L3 cache memory and Hyper-Threading support (four physical cores become eight logical ones in Windows).
On that note, there will be both Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, the latter with 4 MB cache, all of them with Turbo Boost (dynamic overclocking based on performance load).
Availability is scheduled for the winter holiday season of 2014, by which point sufficient 9-series motherboards should be out and about. That's essential because 8-series chipsets won't work for them.
So, to sum up, CPU performance might not make a very large leap this time, but the graphics side of things will progress greatly. In the end, it’s kind of necessary, what with AMD running so far ahead in that area.