Aug

5

Intel takes on AMD and Nvidia with new graphic chips Larrabee

Filed Under GPU and Gaming, Microprocessor | 1 Comment

Over the last two days, the PC industry was quite excited about Intel’s forthcoming high end discrete graphic chips, Larrabee, which are scheduled to launch some time in end of 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee is expected to compete head on with the GeForce and Radeon graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD, respectively (Ref). Remarkably, Intel builds up its graphic chip capability solely through its in-house development effort without acquiring the know how through acquisitions of other graphics companies. In comparison, AMD has obtained its graphics chip capabilities through the acquisition of ATI in 2006.

Compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon which use proprietary graphics-focused cores, Larrabee will use the popular x86 cores with x86 instruction sets, much like a mulit-core CPU. However, Larrabee’s cores will be much simpler than the Core 2 Duo’s cores. It is being designed explicitly for stream processing and rasterized 3D graphics (DirectX/OpenGL) for games. It is also capable of performing ray tracing and physics processing in real time. Another interesting fact is that the design of Larrabee was coming from Intel’s previous Pentium 4 design team (Ref).

You may call Larrabee a GPU, or a mutli-core CPU or whatever. But the truth is the difference between GPU and CPU is now blurring.

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Jun

18

Cinematic 2.0 graphic chips

Filed Under GPU and Gaming, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

Imagine the ability to look around the environments in a sci-fi movie, put yourself in the driver’s seat in a race scene, use your PC to simulate extremely complicated protein folding to help find a cure for debilitating diseases, produce movie-grade blockbuster animation films like “Finding Nemo” and “Kung Fu Panda” in your own PC at home. Yes, now these dreams are not too distant. The technology for this is happening. The top graphic chip makers are about to launch products with the so-called cinematic 2.0 capability that offers awesome teraflop computing power and real-to-life cinematic digital effects.

First, AMD is about to launch the world’s highest performing graphics processor, codenamed RV770, this summer (Ref). The chip has teraflop computing power that is more powerful than any video game console known today. It is claimed to produce amazing cinematic 2.0 visual effects. Second, Nvidia has announced a new family of GeForce GTX 200 graphics processors that are capable of delivering fifty percent more gaming performance over its previous GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU through a whopping 240 enhanced processor cores that can generate resolutions as high as 2560 x 1600 (Ref). Being a embarrassing number 3 in discrete graphics chip market, Intel announced that it is going to fundamentally change its graphic architecture from raster-graphics based to ray-tracing based design which will greatly boost the graphics experience in the future (Ref). Yes, the era of virtual reality is coming soon.

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