Larrabee is a name most of you should remember, or at least try to. Intel is currently working on its first discrete graphics processor with this code name and unlike its integrated GPUs Larrabee will focus on performance and games. Intel will go up against NVIDIA and AMD, which has impressed us with its latest generation of graphics circuits. Intel is planning to launch Larrabee around Q2-Q3 next year and even if most consider it a GPU this is not how Intel sees it.
It considers Larrabee something in between CPU and GPU where there graphics circuit is built from many small x86 CPU cores. One of the advantages with this architecture will be the use of raytracing in games. This was also what Intel showed at Intel Developer Forum earlier this week, using a raytracing version of Enemy Territory Quake Wars.
The demo was supposed to be a proof of concept for raytracing but many at IDF was left unimpressed by the performance and the demo overall.
Mark said that the water effect was achieved with just ten lines of shader code and, boy, that was pretty obvious to us. Yes, it was less complex in terms of code, but the result was something we would only have been happy with about five years ago, – Bit-tech.net
The good thing about Larrabee is that the graphics circuit is functional, but what the performance will be like when it launches and whatever will happen to the raytracing support remains to be seen.
Intel’s Larrabee demonstration
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