Sandy Bridge integrated graphics compared with NVIDIA 320M

[Serpico]

Reviews are up, and Anand as usual has some of the most thorough coverage out there.

Here they directly compare the Sandy Bridge GPU with the NVIDIA 320M found in all 13" and 11" Macbook Pros/Airs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4084/intels-sandy-bridge-upheaval-in-the-mobile-landscape/5

In a nutshell, an Intel IGP is finally faster than NVIDIA integrated graphics. This is fantastic news. Relevant to this forum, the 13" and 11" Macbook Pros/Airs can finally move on from the Core 2 Duo/NVIDIA combo and not worry about compromising graphics, and other PC notebook makers can offer the latest Intel CPU in their lightweight or low cost models without having them be crippled by horrible on-board graphics.

 

[aznx]

Lacks OpenCL for now.

 

[Serpico]

Lacks OpenCL for now.

I totally forgot about that. I did some quick Googling and found this from Ars:

In addition, Intel reportedly plans to support OpenCL on Sandy Bridge, in a roundabout way. Apple has embraced OpenCL by integrating support in to Mac OS X 10.6, and using NVIDIA controllers in its lower-end systems meant that all of Apple's shipping computers were compatible with the standard. The basic architecture of Intel's Sandy Bridge IGP can't support OpenCL functions at all—it's based on an archaic, specialized design that doesn't do GPGPU and will be replaced in Ivy Bridge later in 2011. But, Intel has been working on supporting OpenCL on its CPUs—with four simultaneous threads available on dual-core chips, it may be possible to execute OpenCL code acceptably fast on the CPU itself.

Further clarified:

Intel will be putting in special-purpose circuitry into its Sandy Bridge chips to augment their GPU capabilities up towards the DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1 specs, because their GPUs themselves don't have those capabilities. This sounds like they are kludging stuff into their processors that won't live past this generation until they add the proper functionality into their GPUs directly. So once their GPUs are upgraded how much support will these kludge circuits have from Intel?

So it sounds like they're going to have purpose built solutions for the smaller Macbooks, if it does happen. We'll see.