They’ve managed to close the gap somewhat with AMD in the power consumption realm, with measurable power savings (as Rob discovered in the review of the ASUS P5Q Deluxe). The P45 is, by and large, an evolutionary part – there aren’t major earth-shattering changes, except for the shrink in manufacturing process.
PCI Express 2.0 support will enable similar performance to current PCI Express embodiments, but with fewer lanes total, so the fact that the P45 only has 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes to divide up isn’t a major tragedy with current graphics cards.
Much more notable with the move to the 4-Series is the introduction of the GMA X4500 graphics core, even with the enterprise-class X43. The very fact that Intel has chosen to anchor their 4-Series product lineup with a DirectX 10 part does two things – it pushes AMD’s value-line 690G chipset into virtual irrelevance as a DX9 part with Shader Model support that’s limited to Version 2.0, and it states definitively that the bottom end of the integrated-graphics totem pole will be a DirectX 10 part, effectively sounding the death knell for DirectX 9 parts. Intel’s 4-Series chipset release is more exciting than it has any right to be, given the mere fact that it’s a chipset release, and not something sexier like a range of CPUs or GPUs. However, the excitement is mainly clustered around the G45 graphics processor, which combines all the functionality of P45 with the Intel GMA X4500HD graphics processor, for a part that’ll be in high demand among builders of media center and home theater PCs, and go toe-to-toe with high-end integrated-graphics offerings from manufacturers whose names are more synonymous with graphics performance.
Time and further testing will tell whether the G45 has what it takes to grab a significant chunk of the media center PC market.
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