Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs Will Play Blu-ray 3D

Good to know.
is there a new 3D standard to come? or does it the same of an existing technology?

Mobile? 3d on a phone? Lulz...

I think that picture is from the porno Avatar. Is that on purpose?

It looks like it will become harder and harder to justify a 300 dollar video card now that I play games less...

Intel has been needing to step up its IGP efforts....AMD/ATI has been squashing them in that space....

Tramit, you seriously consider buying expensive video cards and you barely game? >__>

Could only imagine watching people try and find an insert for Blu Ray discs on a Blackberry

I'm not taking bets on it improving regular graphics requirements. It does sound interesting though. Even if I would never be likely to buy one.

The thing is that you would have to purchase a 3-D compatible video card and monitor to go with it.

my only question on this would be compatibility with other gpus. AMD has siad they will be allowing the on chip gpu crossfire with a graphics card. it is very unlikely that intel will have this one chip competing with ati/nvidias offerings so unless they plan to try to aquire nvidia (again) they'd need somethign like the lucid hydra for enthusiasts/gamers to really consider with on-chip gpu to be of use.

that is unless intel wants to start releaseing thier own stand alone graphics card that would communicate and split the load between the onchip gpu and another graphics card made by iintel in which case i say all the better for us as consumers having 3 major graphics card makers out there would be great for the market!

My PowerCooler 550W power supply is also able to play 3D DVDs!

Am I the only person that can't wait for this 3D fad to completely fade out....

Playing 3D movies has nothing to do with DirectX or OpenGL (what GPUs do best). I thought that video encoding/decoding programs benefit from CPU speed and multi-threading and thus more CPU cores and hyper threading, as this test on AnandTech shows.

Maybe the AVX instructions are used for this?

This is cool. If it get into mobile chips. I think Apple might actually invest into this too for their iphone. I can now see ARM in some trouble. Transition to 3D is getting closer and closer.

wow i am surprised !!

i was hoping for sandy bridge to do more than just let ppl watch movies on their computers !!

intel should plan on sticking up some GDDR3'3 or GDDR'5 in their integrated graphics instead of sharing a portion of system memory.

im preety sure that the bottleneck to todays integrated graphics is the speed of system memory. if they put something like 64 MB's of graphics memory then todays integrated graphics x4500 or x3100 should be able to decode blueray in 3D.

I do not think we need a whole new architecture to decode movies !!

i am sure that intels marketing message for sandy bridge is not "decoding 3d blue ray movies" !!

and from what i understand sandy bridge includes some hardware enhancements that were supposed to be a part of larrabee.

shouldnt we be expecting to play crysis atleast at 1024 x 1280 resolution with sandy bridge ?

Sandy Bridge? Well that doesn't sound very sturdy! I think I'll count on Fusion to make the world to go round. I mean, nobody has real Fusion technology besides the guys in red! *Crazy too that N.Korea says they've obtained Fusion.....maybe they're spying on AMD? (Gasps!)*

SB Processor is nice.

The IGP.. I doubt it'll be worth anything. A few benchmarks will be released in its favor initially due to a few 'optimizations' in typical Intel fashion. I'll believe it when I have it right infront of me, and Intel is actually doing something with the Drivers.

Hey negative Nellie,
Maybe instead of thumbing everyone down yoou should read a different article...
IMHO anyway...

What is truly needed is a 3D standard so that manufactures aren't making so many competing products. Then would be the time to start adding 3D capabilities to IGP's. Maybe in another 2 years there will be a standard and prices can come down, till then I wouldn't drop a dime on 3D except for a 3DS or an actual movie at the theater.

Also, hey Sony from 1996, where's my virtual reality Playstation that you said would be arriving about now.

I remember one of the old AMD Executives saying at some point the CPU will use the integrated GPU as super inline math co processor. At that point of integration every process will see benefits. Guess what I'm getting at is were are we now? Better yet what steps are both AMD and Intel on and how many processor changes till we see that level of integration? I think of late AMD stated full integration with fusion around 2013.

Any naysayers out there regarding the 3D performance of the Sandy Bridge IGP might want to check out Anandtech's preview of the architecture.

In short the new IGP completely destroys anything else in the same bracket. Indeed, it's pretty much on par with low-end discrete solutions. Of course it's not unthinkable that AMD's Fusion IGP will be leaps and bounds better still but the new Intel IGP really is a significant improvement.

So there's no doubt it'll be able to handle 3D BlueRay content.

As for myself I'm none too impressed with 3D. Not because the very idea is bad but rather because it's still a future tech. As long as there are multiple competing standards and we require expensive custom hardware, inconvenient dongles in the form of glasses or similar and get worse picture quality, color saturation or viewing angles than what good old 2D offers it's not going to take off.

Nice to have the info on supporting 3D. But 'support' isn't quite the same things as 'doing it well'.
Will be better when the actual performance numbers are also available.