Sandy bridge & Llano bad for gamers?

[cbn]

Sideport was introduced back in 2008 with ATI's 4xxx series cards, it supposedly boosted bandwidth between GPUs in dual GPU cards such as the 4870 X2. But for various reasons ATI never enabled it. You can read more about it here at this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3372&p=3

From the article, it seems that Sideport provides 10 GB/s bandwidth (5 GB/s in each direction), and I think for Llano AMD will keep using HyperTransport which is much faster. The current HT version (3.1) provides 51.6 GB/s bandwidth.

Thanks for the link.

If Discrete Video card "sideport" can eliminate microstutter then I think more people will be inclined to consider dual GPU cards or Crossfire.

However, in order for ATI to make APUs really appealing they need to add features to the IGP: Either switchable graphics on the desktop or "GPU load balancing" make sense to me.