Intel Larrabee: An Introduction

I think Larrabee could have some serious affect of the performance of large data storage systems. How long before we start seeing servers with GPUs?

I'm quite excited about Larrabee. I've been bitterly disappointed with both nVidia and ATI in the past, so here's to something new to play with :)

i think ati and nvidia should be worried a little, intel could stun everyone by releasing a monstrously powerful card that blitzes everything...

either way, i can pretty much see this ending up in near enough every dell desktop in the near future.

Great read, but no mention at all about Raytracing?! Thats the entire point of Larrabee! Forming a bridge between the current rasterization based GPU's and upcoming real-time raytracing based games.

It should be able to do both, but espeacially raytracing should work very well. I really hope that as more info is released to developers, we'll see the announcements for games with raytracing support start to pile up.(If not through a little "encouragement" from Intel.)

AMD ATI are being quiet about Intel's Larrabee .... expect an Ace up their sleeve in the coming months. This could indeed get very interesting. Plus we get one more big name player to compete and keep prices as competitive as ever for us - the buying public :)

This looks like a good move for Intel as they will cover 2 potential markets. An add-on card that can boost your number crunching (CAD, video processing, etc...) or give decent 3D performance.

It does remain to be seen what the real-world ability of the chip set in both fields will be, but unless it absolutely stinks then it'll sell to at least 1 of the target audiences.

Also, I hope Intel have got the cooling sorted as I would hate to see a graphics card with a standard Pentium cooler stuck on to it!

@Hugo: Well i got it from a leading real-time raytracer author that works very close with Intel that they are really pushing Larrabee for Raytracing.(Got a source, but it's in dutch) This because the current and close-future CPU's just don't have enough cores. And think about it; if they pull this off, they'll be the only one in the RPU(Raytracing Processing Unit) market. I can see why they'd want that.

Hmm, we'll see. I hope not, but it's far harder to push a software change then a hardware one. I'm crossing my fingers for raytracing here, hoping it won't be THAT long for the games to follow the hardware.