So, I wanted to see if I could come up with an estimate of how powerful the full Skylake Iris Pro is going to be. The existing Broadwell Iris Pro has 48 execution units. Skylake Iris Pro is going to have 72 EUs, a 50 percent increase.
Though it has been released for several months, it's not easy to find benchmarks where Broadwell Iris Pro is compared against decent entry-level GPUs. Anandtech compared it against the R7 250, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. No one buys that piece of crap. What we want to know is how it stacks up to low-end GPUs that people actually care about, like the GTX 750 Ti.
Fortunately, Tom's Hardware just ran a review of Star Wars: Battlefront where they tested it on just about every GPU, integrated or discrete, that's on the market today. This is just one game, but it is a AAA title that seems to be relatively vendor-agnostic, performing well on both AMD and Nvidia cards. At 1080p with Ultra settings and temporal AA, the Broadwell Iris Pro i7-5775C averaged 23 FPS. In comparison, the Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti OC averaged 35 FPS - a 52 percent improvement. On the red team, the Asus R9 270X DirectCU II averaged 46 FPS, exactly double Broadwell Iris Pro's showing.
Adding to this, R7 370 (Trinidad Pro, 1024 SPs) scores 36 FPS. The lower-clocked notebook versions of the GTX750 Ti and R7 370 are the GTX950M and R9 M390. Kudos to Intel if they can come close to the performance of these dGPUs (with a single 45W TDP chip) a few months before NVIDIA/AMD's 16/14nm lineup. Given that Apple is currently using R9 370X based on the old Cape Verde and there's nothing new @ AMD/NVIDIA's roadmap till Polaris/Pascal hits the market, IMHO they've got these options:
- Refresh the MBP 15'' in March with Iris Pro 580 (only), ditching the dGPU option - possibly introducing an external GPU solution (TB3) at the time or later.
- Refresh the MBP 15'' in March with Iris Pro 580 (only), introducing the dGPU version later @ mid-2016 (Polaris/Pascal).
- Refresh the MBP in March with Iris Pro 580 + optional (lower clocked) Geforce GTX950M. Not much faster than the iGPU (if at all) @ gaming but professionals might still benefit from it.
- Refresh the MBP in March with Iris Pro 580 + optional (lower clocked) Geforce GTX950M. New MBP 15'' @ H2-2016 with all the goodies, Iris Pro 580 + Polaris/Pascal dGPU.
If Intel's 10nm process doubles transistor density again, then conceivably Cannonlake Iris Pro could have 144 EUs, which would be about as powerful as a GTX 970. But at that point, it becomes seriously questionable whether 128MB of eDRAM is going to be enough to feed it.
Looks like Intel is adressing this by going 2x128MB @ Kabylake GT4e. What Cannonlake will use is a mystery though.
Congrats on the cite, Sweepr!
+1 to Sweepr as well here :thumbsup:
Thanks.
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