Inside the Intel Ivy Bridge Microarchitecture

The Graphics Engine

The most important change in the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture is the use of a completely new graphics engine. While the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture uses a DirectX 10.1 engine supporting two video monitors, Ivy Bridge uses a DirectX 11 part supporting three video monitors and the new 4K HD video resolution (4096 x 2304). In fact, the HD video decoder embedded in the Ivy Bridge can decode videos up to 4096 x 4096.

Instead of having two separate engines, one handling 2D processing and another handling 3D processing, several blocks were combined and are shared by the two engines, as you can see in Figure 6. (The blocks in green are the ones shared. In the slides presented on this page, “$” means “cache.”) In Figure 7, you can see the full block diagram of the Ivy Bridge graphics engine.

Figure 6: Block diagram of the combined 2D/3D engine

Figure 7: Block diagram of the combined 2D/3D engine

Several enhancements were made to the 2D portion of the graphics engine. Let’s talk about them separately.