That part of the market is becoming increasingly important for game developers. According to the latest system shipment data from research organisation IDC, notebooks now account for around 57% of total PCs sold.
This news has been confirmed by Intel’s new CEO, Brian Krzanich, who told the industry “Over the whole of 2013, Intel has hit an all-time record for the shipment of Core i5 and Core i7 processors”.
“You can see the impact that we’re having on the gaming community when you look at Steam’s online hardware survey”, explained Huddy. “Not only are Intel products in positions 1, 2 and 4 in terms of popularity, but overall more than 16% of Steam’s community are now gaming with Intel graphics”.
The increase in performance is tied in with the increase in hardware being allocated to graphics by Intel.
Although no major silicon manufacturer is going to hand out detailed schematics for their processors, experts believe that just under 20% of the Sandybridge Core series was dedicated to graphics and that this figure has almost doubled by the time you get to Haswell.