Technical Details

First of all there are quite a few different integrated GPU's with Haswell, which is why we've put together a small list:

• HD Graphics GT1 (Desktop)
• HD Graphics 4200 GT2 (Desktop)
• HD Graphics 4400 GT2 (Desktop)
• HD Graphics 4600 GT2 (Desktop)
• HD Graphics 5000 GT3 (Notebook)
• Iris Graphics 5100 GT3 (Notebook)
• Iris Pro Graphics 5200 GT3e (Notebook)

One rather interesting thing is that the most powerful integrated GPU's didn't make it's way into the desktop CPU's. Looking for the best performing desktop IGP you'll find the offers to top out with the HD Graphics 4600 G2 offer. A closer look at the notebook processors shows, that there are even HD Graphics 5000 Series IGP's and with the Iris and Iris Pro Graphics, or in other words GT3, there are integrated graphics cores from Intel, which are supposed to bring chipzilla's graphics power to another level.

So far so good, there are quite a few new and different graphics processors within Intel's CPU range, but what has actually been improved? Unfortunately there isn't too much information on this topic, but at least there are some interesting thnigs we can tell you. Checking out the GT2 IGP, there are 20 of Intel's so called execution units and when looking at the GT3 IGP's there are no less than 40 EU's. Maybe a short recap regarding the HD 4000 you got with Ivy Bridge processors wouldn't be a bad idea at this point. A bit more an one year ago Intel introduced an IGP, which came with 16 EU's. To put things into persepective, the new HD 4600 IGP offers 25 percent more execution units, and it might be interesting to see how this translates performance wise.

With the desktop CPU's we see that there might be a 25 percent performance boost over Ivy Bridge, but what's actually really interesting, and still not yet available are the notebook graphics chips. With the HD 5000 Intel keeps upscaling their existing architecure and in this case we find 40 execution units, which is 2.5 times more than what you got from Ivy Bridge. Thing get even more interesting when checking out the HD 5200 GT3e. Next to the 40 execution units, there is a 128 Megabyte on-chip cache. The benefit of deploying an on-chip cache can bee seen, when looking at the memory bandwidth. Whereas the DDR3-1600 Interface with Ivy Bridge is capable of squeezing up to 25 Gigabyte of data through the bus, the integrated cache offers twice as much, in other words 50 Gigabyte per second.

According to Intel 128 Megabyte of this eDRAM cache should be plenty. Nevertheless it makes sense to offer a decently sized cache, since higher resolutions as well as anti aliasing can quite quickly demand for a lot of cache. The downside of adding quite a few more transistors to a processor is that it is automatically going to burn more power. If the cache is under full load, the CPU will draw 4.5 Watt more power and when the cache is in idle, the additional power consumption tops out at 0.5 Watt. As a desktop user these values don't make you worry, but in a notbook, where manufacturers desperately try to keep power consumption as low as possible, this means, that battery life will go down a bit.

At last there are few other details Intel was working on. All new integrated graphics units do now support DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.0 as well as OpenCL 1.2. Furthermore Haswell CPU's will make it possible to send different pictures to up to three independant displays. Another addition is DisplayPort 1.2 support and improved 4K x 2K resolutions. Last but not least there have been improvements when it comes to decoding JPEG as well as encoding MPEG.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - Crysis 3 & Dirt Showdown
Page 2 - Technical Details	Page 7 - Metro Last Light & Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - Test Setup	Page 8 - Performance Index
Page 4 - 3DMark & Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 9 - Conclusion
Page 5 - Battlefield 3 & Bioshock: Infinite