In honor of SIGGRAPH, I've decided to finish my coverage of all 3 major GPU architectures in the PC ecosystem with a deep dive into the Sandy Bridge GPU:

Sandy Bridge is the first GPU tightly integrated with an x86 through a shared L3 cache. Graphics performance has doubled, thanks to new shader cores and more powerful fixed functions. Sadly, there is no OpenCL or DirectX11 support till Ivy Bridge. Multimedia is superb, with full hardware decoding and accelerated encoding exposed through an API. The new design is a huge advance, but much work remains for future generations.

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT080811195102

Enjoy, and as always, feedback and comments are encouraged!

David