Holy shit, the Iris Pro graphics on Haswell actually look decent. Never thought I'd say that about Intel integrated video. It comes within striking distance of the GT 650m in a lot of cases. Games are playable on medium and sometimes even high settings at decent resolutions. Anandtech gave it a silver award. Intel integrated video that doesn't suck is like hell freezing over. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come. Intel's horrible integrated video has been one of the main obstacles to people getting into PC gaming. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested
Great, except that the chip cost $650. The power use is still too much to bring higher integrated performance to ultrabooks, but too expensive and a little short on performance to replace discreet in gaming notebooks where lower power doesn't really matter due to gaming being 'plugged in' most of the time.
from my perspective, that gpu quality is just a plus. a very large plus as it gives gamers a real option if their getting a high end haswell laptop without wanting to pay a large premium for a discrete gpu if they werent mainly getting the laptop for gaming as they already have a performance desktop.
The "Pro" designation means that it probably wouldn't be appearing in dude "Bro" models anytime soon.
Exactly, it's a $500 price for the cheapest model of the CPU(APU) alone. Most models will have HD4600 graphics, which isn't a great deal faster than existing HD4000. This type of chip is only going to replace low-mid end discreet graphics in high end laptops, which is a pretty small market. Think 13" macbook pro retina as one likely candidate. 15" will likely use a discreet Nvidia 700 series chip.