Intel Integrated Graphics Challenges AMD & Nvidia in the CAD Space

Intel’s integrated graphics have made a lot of progress in the last couple of years, and now the company has decided to go after AMD and Nvidia in the professional CAD market, with the P3000 GPU found inside its Xeon E3 processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture.

In order to achieve this feat, the graphics cores integrated inside Intel’s Xeon E3-1200 processors have now gained OpenGL certification, as well as support for a wide series of high-end architecture and engineering design applications.

The list includes programs such as AutoCAD, RevIT, Inventor, Adobe Photoshop CS5, and Adobe Premiere Elements, while SolidWorks and 3Ds Max should also be added to the list in the not so distant future.

VR-Zone had the chance of playing with AutoCAD on the E3-1275, basically a Xeon version of Core i7-2600K, and reports that performance is satisfactory even for 3D real time manipulation, which is definitely an important achievement for Intel.

To showcase the power of its P3000 integrated graphics, Intel has also published a series of benchmark results comparing the E3-1275 processor with Nvidia’s entry-level Quadro FX580 graphics card, which show the Xeon CPU coming out on top in quite a few tests.

Intel released its Xeon E3-1200 server processors series based on the Sandy Bridge architecture in April last year and the lineup included 12 CPUs, four of these packing the P3000 graphics core.

Other features include support for Intel's Turbo Boost and HyperThreading technologies, 6MB or 8MB of L3 cache memory, dual or quad processing cores and ECC memory support.

The chips use the LGA 1155 socket and later this year will be replaced by a series of new processors based on the 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture, featuring pretty much the same specs as the current models, but slightly higher operating clocks and improved graphics.