Larrabee
The Larrabee has probably been the most intriguing chip for the past few years. What will be its potential? Its use? How successful will it be? At this time, all of these questions remain unanswered.
The Larrabee stems from the tera-scale project which consists of the development of massively multicore processors destined to eventually replace generalized processors in the long run. In the mid-term they are meant to serve as versatile accelerators for tasks that are well suited to parallelization. Graphic rendering is of course one of these tasks.
While there is nothing new and concrete concerning the Larrabee, the battle with Nvidia, and to a lesser extent with AMD is now clear. Pat Gelsinger, an emblematic technical figure at Intel, gets straight to the point. He says loud and clear that 3D rendering as it is known today has come to a point where it’s now too limited and doesn’t have much more room for evolution. This leads us to ray-tracing, a discourse the company has already had for some time now. There is one small evolution, however, as Intel changes the name “ray tracing” to “Photorealistic 3D”. Of course it’s a term that means nothing, Nvidia and AMD have been talking about it for a while, but it's easier to "sell" for marketing.
While this method of rendering evidently has numerous advantages, it remains very resource heavy. Also, despite the uncontestable improvement in rendering speed, we are skeptical about the possibility of seeing it widely used for some time. This is all the more so true that Intel hasn’t shown anything new on the subject. Moreover, the ray traced Quake 4 demo is starting to look a little outdated compared to current games just like the questionable artistic slides used to speak of the visual revolution it entails.
Integrated graphics
More pertinent, Intel wants to affirm loud and clear that its integrated graphic cores aren’t as bad as Nvidia and AMD claim. And it especially wants to counter Nvidia which has just launched an unequivocal offensive against Intel. The CPU maker goes of course a bit too far in saying its products display better video quality than competing graphic cards.
DirectX 10 compatibility since the 965G was always referred to in a vague manner. It has now been made clear. More or less, except the 965G, whose first versions probably suffered from a bug on this level, all of Intel’s recent chips will support DirectX 10 via a driver that is planned in the near future. So the 965GM and G35 will support this API as well as the G45 which is about to arrive. This last will add some improvements though with the same overall architecture. The increase in frequency (to 800 MHz) will produce a gain of 25% in terms of brute power. Other gains will come from small details like a higher geometrical processing speed and transcendental functions (SIN, COS etc.) that are implemented more efficiently.
The most important innovations for the G45 will involve video with native Displayport support and especially complete support of video acceleration as defined by the Bluray standard. This should be something to bring Intel up to the level of the competition. Another help in putting them back on track will be in terms of reliability in games. Intel seems to be trying to work more and more with developers to prepare for the future and also to improve support of current products while at the same time heavily insisting on its market shares.
The roadmap for integrated graphic cores mentions the Havendale, a dual core derived Nehalem which has a graphic core. However, Intel specifies that there will be partial integration to the CPU and we will have to wait for Sandy Bridge architecture in 2010 for total integration. Our interpretation of this information is that the GPU will be a distinct component in the Havendale while in the Sandy Bridge the graphic core will use the CPU’s calculation units.
