Intel's Gelsinger: Today's Graphics Are Coming to an End

Despite the fact that Intel said during the pre-IDF briefing that there will be no future updates regarding the Larrabee project during the event, Pat Gelsinger came loaded with other juicy details regarding the multi-core behemoth.

According to him, the current graphics architecture will fall into oblivion, no matter how powerful they are. This is mostly because of the fact that their structure cannot scale up to match the future requirements in the industry. "The graphics pipeline is too inefficient for the next-generation workloads that will be created and used," Gelsinger explained.

The graphics industry's future seems to lie in a programmable, ubiquitous and unified architecture, which is pretty much one and the same with the company's Larrabee project. More than that, Intel expects the ray-tracing technology to shift from the high-end market sector into the mainstream graphics software.

The multi-core Larrabee can currently deliver about one teraflop of computing performance on a single silicon die, using an extremely short pipeline. The processed data can further be offloaded on both the on-die cache and to the local memory using high-bandwidth lanes.

"There is stunning excitement from ISVs for Larrabee," claimed Gelsinger. He also noted that he has never seen that much hype surrounding a product in over 30 years of expertise on the graphics market.

The Larrabee project is an extremely important achievement, that promises to change both the corporate sector and the high-end gaming arena. In a previous statement, Intel officials noted that the multi-core graphics processor can also be used in high-performance computing, since the Larrabee comes with 100 instructions and can completely crunch the code written for the x86 chips.

Gelsinger also demonstrated two extremely graphics-intensive titles slated for release later this year: FarCry 2 and Quake 4 RT. The Larrabee project might be regarded as an important leap towards delivering photorealistic games that will be available to the masses.