Intel Open-Sources Broadwell GPU Driver & Indicates Major Silicon Changes 103
An anonymous reader writes "Intel shipped open-source Broadwell graphics driver support for Linux this weekend. While building upon the existing Intel Linux GPU driver, the kernel driver changes are significant in size for Broadwell. Code comments from Intel indicate that these processors shipping in 2014 will have "some of the biggest changes we've seen on the execution and memory management side of the GPU" and "dwarf any other silicon iteration during my tenure, and certainly can compete with the likes of the gen3->gen4 changes." Come next year, Intel may now be able to better take on AMD and NVIDIA discrete graphics solutions."
Re:Meh (Score:2, Interesting)
Discrete math coprocessors are actually the interesting one, because they were integrated, and then un-integrated again. We just re-named them to "GPUs" (that is after all all a GPU is, a very parallel vector maths processor, with a tiny bit of rasterisation hardware tacked onto it). That said, yes I fully expect that integration of GPUs is only going to continue.