Intel Research Day – Keynote (Live)

QA: What’s Intel’s take on GPU computing?: “we’re not taking issues on GPUs…” “GPUs are the correct architectural response to a traditional view on visual computing. We have to move beyond raster graphics…” “multi-core CPUs can outperform GPUs at ray-tracing”.

There you go, here’s a new round of controversy in the making. It looks like Intel is going to present a Larrabee paper at SIGGRAPH to promote their vision, so we’ll see how good it is on the paper, at least. Justin Rattner (Intel Senior Fellow) thinks that there is a need to move “beyond” rasterization (why?), and therefore beyond GPUs as we know them today. If you are interested by the subject, read my article titled “NVIDIA: we are going to open a can of whoo-ass”, where I explain why Intel’s position on the subject is a little shaky because as we speak, that Intel is making a GPU that uses rasterization.

10:34: That’s all folks, now we’re going on the show floor to take a peek. Come back later for a few more posts about the Research@Intel Day 2008. Now that we know what Intel is looking at, let’s see what they have to show us.

10:29: Next great things: Visual Computing (graphics and real-time visual computing), Mobility, Health, Environment (low power), Exploratory (long term)

10:26: Parallel Computing. This is clearly a hot topic. If you work on a problem that is parallel by nature, having more cores can help… a lot. Right now, the professional sector is the target, but consumers also have many needs that would gain from having massive amounts of cores: video/audio compression, image processing…

10:23: What’s coming next?

Platform Power Management : keep the system in sleep mode for longer periods of time. Well, it sounds simple, but it did require a ton of work in the hardware and the software. I noticed that Intel started to work on a bunch of small energy gains, that put together, makes a noticeable difference.

10:20: WiMAX: also a project that the Intel Architecture Labs got interested in back in 1999. In 2002, a few start-ups acquisitions helped develop the first chips. In 2008 Intel is expected to bring WiMAX to the mass market in force. At CES 2008, we’ve seen a demo of it.

10:13: vPro: IT management solutions integrated in the platform. Well, it makes IT’s work easier, but that’s not really the most exciting part of your computer

10:10: Atom: the idea of an ultra-low power X86 processor started in 1999 in the Microprocessor Research Lab (MRL). This is something that has not been publicized since the public announcement, but is a great example of long-term research.

10:05: Ok, the keynote has started and Justin Rattner, an intel senior fellow is presenting.

09:57: The keynote is about to begin, our friends from Nikkei are here (below: Akiko Tanaka)

09:00: Ok, we’re in, I have ventured on the showfloor to talk to the engineers for 15mn or so, but PR was kind enough to remind me that the breakfast is in the other room. I can tell you that Intel is going to demo an updated version of the Quake Engine, using ray-tracing…

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers