Intel Ivy Bridge Hybrid Series
Intel's Ivy Bridge series has been
extensively tested already, but we’ve never approached them as APUs. Meanwhile,
the release of the OpenCL 1.1 support on the graphics core was one of the main
advantages of this microarchitecture. Indeed, Ivy Bridge can be considered as
the Intel's first hybrid processor generation. Even though Intel itself avoids
this designation, only because the APU concept was coined by its opponents,
modern Intel CPU has every right to be discussed as APUs besides solutions from
AMD.
Intel
Ivy Bridge Hybrid Series
Like Trinity, the Ivy Bridge processor
incorporates three constituent parts: x86 core, a graphics core and North
Bridge (aka System Agent). he microarchitecture of the x86 cores, which may
number up to four inside one chip, is a next, yet not very big, step ahead in
the evolution of Intel’s exclusive Core design. Compared with the previous
generation x86 core (Sandy Bridge), there are but very few changes which mostly
boil down to the transition to 22nm technology process. On the other hand, Intel’s
current products are blameless when it comes to conventional computing as they
offer much higher performance than their competitors, because most execution
Ivy Bridge cores parts are full-featured and self-sufficient units, which do
not share any functional subunits with their neighbors and can even execute two
instruction threads concurrently thanks to the Hyper-Threading technology.
Considering the high computing capability
of modern Intel CPUs, we will only take dual-core Ivy Bridge products to
compare with AMD’s APUs. Their quad-core's relatives are basically faster than
Trinity in performance as well as price, so they should be considered as a
separate product segments that target high-performance computer with discrete
graphics card. By limiting our scope in this way, we do not limit our choice of
Intel graphics core: there are all existing Intel HD Graphics modifications
available among the dual-core Ivy Bridge CPUs.
That is mostly suitable for our purposes
because the new generation graphics cores implemented in the Ivy Bridge series
vastly differ from their predecessors, making reasonable price LGA1155 CPUs competitive
against Trinity APUs. Most importantly, the new HD Graphics is compatible with
DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenCL 1.1, so it can work with any modern 3D and
computing algorithms. In addition, Intel has almost double the 3D performance
of Ivy Bridge series, incorporating up to 16 execution units with improved
bandwidth in the integrated graphics core.
16
execution units with improved bandwidth in the integrated graphics core
However, it should be noted, that AMD,
being the inventor of the APU concept, puts much more emphasis on the 3D
capabilities of its processors. In the Intel's design, the graphics core takes
about 30% of the total area of the semiconductor chip with four x86 cores while
the Trinity core graphic design takes more than 45% of the total area. However,
Intel agree with AMD that graphics core is expected to do something more than
just building and outputting image. That's why the HD Graphics series has been
developed in terms of rendering pipeline as well as HD video decoding. Intel
also offers Quick Sync technology support hardware encoding of video into H.264
format.
In
the Intel's design, the graphics core takes about 30% of the total area of the
semiconductor chip
The less conspicuous position of the
graphics core in the Ivy Bridge CPU is somewhat compensated by the developer’s
increased focus on the CPU-integrated North Bridge Considering that the
performance of an integrated graphics core is often limited by its memory
bandwidth, it is now connected to the CPU’s common ring bus. Therefore, it can
also access the system memory just like the x86 cores and also make full use of
the fast L3 cache which is an integral part of every high performance Intel
CPU.
For this article, we examine four Ivy
Bridge variants that fit into the same price category as the AMD Trinity
series. They are low-level Core i3 models with different versions of the Intel
graphics the same as Pentium and Celeron CPU which graphics core is exactly
called HD Graphics that do not have any numbers yet, but has the same
architecture. Basic Specifications of the CPU is listed in the following table:
Basic
Specifications
