IDF Spring 2007 - Day Zero - Radio Harmony and Geneseo

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Kahn was followed by Ajay Batt, Intel Fellow, and general very clever person. He looks after a project that seems to fly in the face of Intel’s current move towards multi-core architecture. Geneseo is designed to enable dedicated silicon to accelerate special applications, such as game physics, financial portfolio management and scientific data mining.

Now this seems naturally to be the forte of the massively multi-core architectures that Intel is moving toward, making the whole project seem rather contradictory with Intel’s current strategy. Indeed, one of Ajay’s slides listed Aegia, and we’ve already seen that this its PhysX cards are a technology that’s struggling in the market, with GPUs performing Havok physics and games such as Alan Wake and Crysis performing all of their tricks on the multi-core CPUs.

I asked Ajay about this, (when standing next to him in the lunch queue) and his explanation essentially boiled down to the fact that Intel is giving choice. There are those that prefer, or simply understand better the approach of dedicated hardware and it is to these companies and vendors that Geneseo is aimed.

Geneseo will be built on the next generation PCI Express 1.0 revision, expected by 2008, which amongst other things will double bandwidth from 2-5 GigaTransfers/second.

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