Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed

A very interesting feature of the Ivy Bridge architecture is a new digital random number generator code-named Bull Mountain, which uses teetering as an integral part of its workings. [1]<p>While consumer-oriented reviews rightfully ignore such things, I reckon that the HN crowd would be pleased to know more about such a nifty hardware solution.<p>[1] <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-generator/0" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-ne...</a>

I guess I don't really understand why this is impressive - the GPU is still not good enough to handle modern gaming and apparently has some issues with media encoding as well (although I will admit that that section confused me somewhat), and it sounds like the CPU is just a modest upgrade in efficiency.<p>I'm not saying it's bad, it looks like solid progress form Intel as we all continue to expect, but I don't get why this is considered 'tick+' when it seems less exciting to me than Nehalem.

Was anyone else looking at those die photos and thinking that it'd be better to put 4 more cores in that space occupied by the GPU?

Agreed this report comes across a bit underwhelming, but the integrated GPU boost is really what I've been waiting for. And it's more power efficient to boot.<p>I don't play games, but I do have a crazy-big monitor and want a bit more oomph drive the display before I get a notebook without a dedicated graphics card. Still waiting on the dual core ...

for my usage pattern, still no reason for me to move from the core 2 quad.

This is the first time I've heard of Quick Sync. Sounds useful.<p>It's only supported on Windows, with a proprietary SDK. No documentation. Yay...

<p><pre><code> implements support for DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1, and OpenGL 3.1. </code></pre> This should be a boon for game developers.