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Intel releases graphics programming manuals
Intel releases graphics programming manuals
Posted Feb 1, 2008 10:54 UTC (Fri) by danielhedblom (subscriber, #47307)In reply to: Intel releases graphics programming manuals by marduk
Parent article: Intel releases graphics programming manuals
I would switch every machine i have in possession at an instance. I cant understand why Intel doesnt do this.
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Intel releases graphics programming manuals
Posted Feb 1, 2008 14:08 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
They are going to. Yes, indeed, Intel says they are coming out with a discrete video card with advanced GPU on it. It's currently called 'Larrabee'. It's a new GPU architexture designed to be easy to program for. It will consist of 16-24 'x86-like' in-order proccessor cores and a completely programmable pipeiline. It should provide a _massive_ amount of floating point performance. Blowing the doors off of anything coming out of Nvidia or ATI.. however due to it's design it will not be as highly optimized for gaming as a traditional GPU and that will cause it to lag behind other video cards in DirectX 10/11 performance. It would require gaming engines to be modified to take full advantage of it. (At least this is the speculation on it right now). But the cool thing about it is that it would be easy to program for, I think. You can take a software-only OpenGL stack and only with a few modifications compile it to take advantage of the GPU. This goes the same with any program or other API you can think off. Graphics acceleration, realtime raytracing, media encoding, etc. Sort of like programming for SSE or something like that. CPU++ All this stuff is a bit over my head. But I don't care.. if it's going to be open like this I am getting one. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If it's open then Linux folks should be able to embrace it so fast and turn Linux into a Floating Point powerhouse so fast it will make Bill Gate's head spin. I am speculating that since Windows is very slow in adopting new hardware architectures that Intel is going to use Linux to provide a platform for developers who want to take advantage of it early on. Similar to how AMD used Linux to provide advanced support for their 64-bit CPUs long before MS released a stable 64bit version of their OS for it. It's suppose to be out by late 2009 or early 2010. Latest news about it that I know about: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080117-larrabee-be... Here is a bunch of GPU geeks giving their insightfull 2 cents in on the subject: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46393 Oh, and Tungstun graphics is working on a API that should come in handy for a very flexible GPU. It's designed to replace the complexity of DRI drivers with minimal code and maximum flexibility. They claim that they can take the a driver and reduce it down to a couple thousand lines of code and not loose functionality. Something like that. They claim to have a mostly working driver for the i915 chipset and have a driver for i965 and the Cell proccessor. Cool stuff. http://www.tungstengraphics.com/gallium3D.htm
Too late
Posted Feb 1, 2008 15:03 UTC (Fri) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link]
It's [Larrabee] supposed to be out by late 2009 or early 2010. Two years from today? Did the Itanic team "rescue" them?
Too late
Posted Feb 1, 2008 15:52 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
No. The Larrabee stuff is made by a seperate group of folks from within Intel setup specificly for working on this GPU stuff. They called it a 'internal venture company' or something like that. Remember CPUs are not like software. Intel and AMD and friends are always working on tech 2-3 generations out. The latest and greatest cpus you can buy right now from Intel were probably designed in 2003-2004 or so.