14 DAY TRIAL // Intel is undoubtedly the worldwide leading chip manufacturer and, as NVIDIA is disputing AMD for the highest-performance graphics card crown, the company might be planning to change the graphics scene altogether. Development for the upcoming Larrabee processor is currently underway and it is precisely it that got people saying that it would turn out to be the biggest thing the graphics market has ever seen.
According to several ongoing rumors, Intel's upcoming Larrabee processor will not need DirectX, as it will use direct mode instead. Despite the fact that this sounds very strange, it is very likely that Intel has decided that the current graphics market is in need of a considerable change. In fact, the Larrabee will most probably be nothing like the GPU designs we are seeing today at both NVIDIA and ATI, AMD's subsidiary.
It is yet unclear how Intel plans to implement this "direct mode" but, if the rumors are true, it means that the company has seen this as the best way to go. So, we should expect this "direct mode" to present the graphics industry with some real benefits. Then again, the new design will most probably raise a myriad of problems for gaming developers, as they will need to write a specific code that will support Larrabee-based products.
Furthermore, this proves that Intel must really believe that the direction in which it is taking the Larrabee project will prove successful, despite the fact that no one is quite ready for it. It is also probable that the Santa-Clara based chip manufacturer has went ahead and developed its own API, just like Voodoo Graphics did with the Glide API back in the old days. Nevertheless, these are merely speculations since, right now, nothing concrete about Intel's Larrabee has been made available.
At the launch of Intel's Larrabee, a number of games will probably be released to support and take advantage of the architecture of the new GPU. However, this is yet to be confirmed as no game developer has announced such intentions so far.