Conclusions
Intel's transformation from a graphics laggard to a viable competitor has been a long journey. The strategy has been one of consistent and measured improvement, rather than a dramatic revolution. With Sandy Bridge, Intel doubled the graphics performance of the previous generation Ironlake, and brought acceptable integrated graphics to the PC ecosystem in early 2010.
Ivy Bridge tackles GPU programmability and will nearly double performance yet again.
Competitively, the Sandy Bridge GPU was eclipsed 6 months after release by AMD's Llano GPU, which was both higher performance and programmable.
The saving grace was Intel's industry leading media encoding and decoding. Based on reviews and benchmarks, the gap in graphics performance varies from 1.3× to 2×.
AMD's next integrated offering in Trinity is reportedly 1.3× to 1.5× faster than the previous generation and should have competitive media processing.
Putting this all together, Intel will substantially narrow the gap with AMD for integrated graphics capabilities in 2012. Actual product level performance depends on pricing, binning and the market. For instance, Intel has an edge for very low power designs due to process technology. The 22nm FinFETs are exceptionally efficient at low voltage and it is likely that Ivy Bridge will match Trinity for 17W designs. At 25-35W for conventional notebooks, Intel should trail by around 20%, which is close enough to be competitive.
Looking to desktops though, AMD will have a substantial advantage and the performance gap may be much higher.
Based on these estimates, the Ivy Bridge GPU will be the first truly competitive integrated graphics solution and a significant milestone for Intel.
AMD has the benefit of over a decade of experience with high performance graphics and can leverage tremendous investments in discrete GPUs.
While Intel might lack the same experience, it appears that a full process node advantage (22nm vs. 32nm) makes up for this deficiency.
Ivy Bridge should exceed Llano in most workloads, and compared to Trinity, narrow the performance gap to reasonable levels for most markets.
Looking forward, there are some features that simply did not make it into Ivy Bridge and are obvious candidates for Haswell. In particular, the programmability is still somewhat nascent. Features such as DX11.1 and OpenCL 1.2 were omitted either due to project timing or risk and complexity reasons, and are expected in the next generation.
System level integration was mostly unchanged in Ivy Bridge, but will probably be updated for Haswell. That would present an opportunity for more elegant sharing of the virtual address space and coherent communication between the CPU and GPU and greater efficiency.
The performance should increase, particularly if the rumors are correct and there are 3 different variants of Haswell.
That would give Intel the freedom to aggressively push performance for an expensive, high-end version, without compromising cost for the 'free' or mainstream flavors.