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Just in case you were worried that Intel wasn’t committed to it’s heavily delayed Larrabee platform, a 12 million dollar investment in a new Visual Computing Institute should help convince you otherwise. Located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, this is the largest joint project ever formed between Intel and a European university. The institute will help Intel explore advanced graphical computing technologies, which includes everything from more realistic gaming, to advanced 3D user interfaces.
The primary focus of the research will be applied to Intel’s terascalling program. This will help them better understand how they can apply Larrabees unique multi x86 core architecture to achieve sustainable performance increases over modern day GPU’s. Larrabee has been delayed until some unknown date in 2010, presumably because it hasn’t yet achieved the type of performance gains they were hoping for against Nvidia & AMD.
In addition to terascalling research, Intel will also work with other hardware design labs in Barcelona, Spain, and Braunschweig, Germany to help optimize the Larrabee design. Z-buffering, clipping, and even ray tracing are all promises made by the Larrabee team, but clearly the software needed to make all this happen still requires some work.
Want more details? Click here to watch the press video.
So is Larrabee really the future? Or does this only prove Nvidia’s case that its promise is overhyped?
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neo1piv14
May 18, 2009 at 11:20am
Even if Larabee performs like a 2006 ATI or Nvidia part, that's still light years ahead of Intel Integrated graphics these days, so I guess it's something of step up. I don't see why Intel is even bothering to step into the GPU ring. Just focus on making your integrated graphics at least capable of pushing some high def video and we'll be happy.
