Intel beefs up integrated graphics in Skylake server chips

If you are not happy with the quality of streaming video, it's perhaps because your provider's server doesn't have a good graphics processor.

To address that, Intel is improving the integrated graphics processor in its new Xeon E3-1500 v5 family of server chips. Servers with the chips will be able to deliver multiple 4K video streams over the Internet to PCs and mobile devices.

The chips are based on the Skylake design and have the Iris Pro Graphics P580, which Intel claims is its best integrated GPU.

Intel says that about 80 percent of the Internet traffic is video, and better GPUs are needed to improve the quality of streams.

Many servers use discrete GPUs like AMD's FirePro and Nvidia's Quadro to process streaming video. Intel's Iris Pro isn't as powerful, but is a power-efficient alternative that won't use up a PCI-Express slot in a server.

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