2011/09/20 Post-IDF bites: Ivy Bridge GPU to support 4Kx4K displays!－真乄科技業的頂尖投資團隊

With all the hustle and bustle of IDF, one piece of news, gently unveiled in one of side technical sessions at the conference, mostly passed unnoticed. It was a particular detail about the updated graphics and multimedia processing hardware in the upcoming Ivy Bridge series of processors, expected to hit the shelves about half a year from now.

It wasn't the fact that the new chip will have graphics far faster - some expect at least double, and much more in some operations - than the Sandy Bridge, or the full DirectX 11 and DirectCompute capability, with an OpenCL port to follow. Neither was it the much tighter connection to the L3 cache for more usability in graphics tasks.

It's the vastly improved display capability, and associated ultra high resolution video processing, of the new chip - in fact, so high it stands on an equal footing with the fastest high end discrete GPUs in this particular measurement: the 4K display resolution. Take a look at their Multi Format Codec or MFX engine, capable of playing multiple 4K videos at the same time, even a wall of them, as Intel says.

Not only can the MFX engine display up to 4096 x 4096 pixels on a single monitor, but it can also handle video processing for 4K QuadHD video as well. Remember when, two years ago, Jen Hsun Huang at Nvidia for the first time encouraged 4K resolution - at that time 3840x2400 or as he called it XHD2, for ultra realistic gaming too, to use the extra pixels to justify the high end card need? Now, what a fate, Intel is making it real on the - integrated graphics platform, of all. Now, can we have back those 16:10 3840x2400 or, better, 4096x2560 monitors?