Intel gives first public Larrabee demonstration
Intel gave their first public demonstration of their new Larrabee GPU at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The first standalone GPU from the company in 10 years is set to compete with the other two big names in the GPU arena, nVidia and ATi.
Intel displayed the capabilities of their chip with a demo of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The Larrabee was paired with Intel’s new 32nm Gulftown, a six-core CPU.
Sean Maloney, executive vice president of Intel, and chief sales and marketing officer, presented the demonstration, explaining that it was a “ray tracing demo.” The intensive rendering technique draws a scene by calculating the interaction of light rays with 3D objects in the scene, giving very realistic shadow and light effects.
There is a reason why ray tracing is often the reserve of pre-rendered graphics, as the computational power required to do this in real time is rather extreme. A number of journalists attending the presentation were less than impressed with the brief demonstration, observing noticeable frame drops.
Maloney briefly mentioned Intel’s plans to integrate the Larrabee into a CPU in the future, but did not divulge much more information than that.
Intel Larrabee – comments and views
Loading ...