Many computer users have mixed feelings about the merger of traditional processor and graphics accelerator functions within new Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. Those who do not intend to use integrated graphics, but believe that the “unnecessary” integrated graphics core has a negative effect on the processors pricing, are particularly unhappy about it. However, their concerns are not totally correct. Even though graphics does increase the die size of the quad-core Sandy Bridge die by about 20%, in reality unification and large production volumes easily make up for Intel’s investments into production of larger dies. However, when you are building a system with integrated graphics inside, having both – computational and graphics – cores inside a single semiconductor die has a ton of advantages. First, it allows to easily share some of the CPU resources, such as L3 cache and memory controller among different cores, which positively affects the integrated graphics performance. Second, by placing all high-frequency and high-performance units inside a single chip, Intel can significantly simplify the overall platform design and give up the use of external high-speed busses.