Published at LXer:

Back in February we reported on the first signs of open-source support for Intel's Sandybridge, a.k.a. their sixth-generation Intel graphics processor integrated on their upcoming CPUs that succeed the Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs. The Sandybridge hardware still has not launched nor will it until late this year or early next year, but the open-source support has been underway for months and from time to time we see new Linux code patches related to Sandybridge.

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I personally have always been a fan of the CPU/GPU combos, which really do allow for MUCH more accelerated hardware: Since the GPU is on the CPU, it can share the CPU's RAM. You could easily have one memory module dedicated to graphics and the other module dedicated to general-purpose computing, maximizing graphics performance. And what's more amazing is that the first processor of that series to implement this is the new Atom, meaning that netbooks will see the first performance improvement. And for Intel to support them in Linux is even better.

The only thing I have against this is that then the available RAM to the CPU is not the advertised RAM in the specs. For example, if a machine has 2 GiB of RAM, and the GPU "shares" 256 MiB of this, then that reduces the available RAM to 1792 MiB. If you have a dedicated GPU with 512 MiB of its own VRAM which is indepedent of the system memory, then the 2 GiB advertised system RAM remains fully available to the CPU.