Intel Lets Larrabee Loose

Author Riyad Emeran
Published 23rd Sep 2009
Intel Lets Larrabee Loose
Bookmark and Share discuss this article  7 comments    Email  Email trustedreviews newslettersTrustedReviews Newsletters

We've all been waiting a long time to catch a glimpse of Intel's new graphics chip in action, and a glimpse is exactly what Sean Maloney gave the crowd at IDF today. Intel confirmed that Larrabee will be shipping as a discrete graphics solution, at least at first, with dev boxes already heading to software developers.


Maloney also confirmed that Larrabee will eventually be integrated into a CPU - integration was the watch word for Sean's keynote after all. But today's demo system comprised a discrete Larrabee chip along with Intel's Gulftown 32nm, six-core CPU, and with that kind of processing power it came as something of a surprise that the demo was so, well, disappointing.


The demo in question was basically Quake Wars: Enemy Territory being rendered in real time using ray tracing, and to say that it looked nothing special is an understatement. In fact, when aircraft entered the scene, it was clear that the frame rate was woefully low. Add to that the fact that the water effect resembled what you might see in a game five years ago, and I and many other journos were left wandering whether Larrabee will be worth the wait.


I'm not entirely sure what Intel's obsession is with real time ray tracing, especially since even a next generation, multi-core hardware platform can't seem to render it smoothly. Sometimes different isn't better, it's just different.

discuss this article  7 comments
Email this article to a friend Email
Bookmark and Share


 

Newsletters

Register to receive the latest Reviews and News Headlines directly to your Inbox every day, and enter our regular competitions. More Info.

Your Name


Email Address


Latest 4 of 7 Comments

Have your say: Leave a comment below about this article.

comment Hugo said on 23rd September 2009

Anyone saying we're reaching the limits of what rasterization can do is living in cloud cuckoo land. nVidia, ATI, Microsoft (the guys behind DirectX - you may have heard of it) and... more

comment jopey said on 24th September 2009

I think a little bit of perspective is in order. The current best real-time ray tracing is done on clusters of cell blade servers and the geometric complexity of those videos is no... more

comment Riyad said on 24th September 2009

@jopey - you've hit the nail right on the head. The question that we all asked Intel out here in San Francisco is why we weren't shown Larrabee executing DirectX code. Regardless o... more

comment Carlos said on 27th September 2009

The answer to the question "why did intel not show it executing direct x code" is that it would have been abysmally poor compared to the recent release of the radeon 5 se... more

See all 7 comments on this article.

add comment Add your comment

You must be logged in to comment. Login or register here.