http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/20/intel_labs_mario/
my fav bit:
The Games People Play
While Intel hopes to gain the attention of customers outside of the gaming set, it can't help but show off what a terascale chip would do for a first person shooter.
Intel has spent the last couple of years pumping the idea that ray tracing – a rendering technique that provides more sophisticated interactions between light and objects - will conquer raster graphics.
Despite pursuing its own graphics chip agenda, Intel contends that mainstream, multi-core x86 chips will bring video games to life in ways that the GPU crowd cannot match. The physics calculations demanded by techniques such as ray tracing make a “general purpose” x86 chip ideal for producing the graphics-rich games of tomorrow.
“GPUs are not set up for the general purpose types of workloads that we're talking about,” noted one of Intel's researchers. “Physics is one of the most general workloads, and those types of calculations will fly on (the multi-core) chips.”
Besides being better suited to certain workloads, general purpose chips from Intel boast large on-chip memory stores. The limited local memory of GPUs hampers the products from “rendering complex scenes” in games, according to Intel.
my fav bit:
The Games People Play
While Intel hopes to gain the attention of customers outside of the gaming set, it can't help but show off what a terascale chip would do for a first person shooter.
Intel has spent the last couple of years pumping the idea that ray tracing – a rendering technique that provides more sophisticated interactions between light and objects - will conquer raster graphics.
Despite pursuing its own graphics chip agenda, Intel contends that mainstream, multi-core x86 chips will bring video games to life in ways that the GPU crowd cannot match. The physics calculations demanded by techniques such as ray tracing make a “general purpose” x86 chip ideal for producing the graphics-rich games of tomorrow.
“GPUs are not set up for the general purpose types of workloads that we're talking about,” noted one of Intel's researchers. “Physics is one of the most general workloads, and those types of calculations will fly on (the multi-core) chips.”
Besides being better suited to certain workloads, general purpose chips from Intel boast large on-chip memory stores. The limited local memory of GPUs hampers the products from “rendering complex scenes” in games, according to Intel.
