During the power measurements, we noticed some rather extreme power consumption on the CPU, which got us curious as to what was going on here ... A comparison between the two breakout graphs above shows that there is only marginal CPU utilization when a discrete graphics card is used, whereas in the case of the IGP flying solo, the CPU run full throttle ... What this all comes down to is that whenever there is a situation where Intel can offload some of the graphics processing power to the CPU cores, Clarkdale really shines, essentially, it is a smart implementation of sharing power between CPU and GPU that cranks up performance ... The bottom line here is that depending on the contents/workload, and maybe some driver optimizations, Intel has found a way to offload a major portion of the iGFX workload to the CPU cores, which reflects in a substantial performance increase. If the CPU - for whatever reasons - cannot be recruited by the iGFX, graphics performance drops substantially ... Looking at the benchmarks here, particularly the 3DMark Vantage results that are essentially living on x86 subsidiaries, we think we have some sort of backdoor to the (cancelled) Larrabee performance ...