Intel teraflopping into high-end graphics with "Larrabee"

Intel's Paul Otellini IDF keynote shed some new light on the company's Larrabee processor, which is now set for a 2010 release and will compete against AMD and NVIDIA in the realm of high-end graphics. Paul says the chips will scale up to teraflops in speed, and be targeted at science and analytics in addition to graphics -- though he dodged questions about Larrabee potentially being a discrete graphics competitor for AMD and NVIDIA, and only reiterating that "Graphics will also be an area for the chip." Intel has so far stayed squarely in the realm of integrated graphics, but a move to discrete graphics would be quite a welcome shakeup to the current market, and teraflops would certainly make it all the more interesting.

[why not the LS2/LS7? @ Sep 19th 2007 4:15PM]

Why would Intel enter the discrete graphics market?

It'll be a dying market by then.

It's the same as the audio add-on card market. It took less time to integrate onto the motherboard since it required fewer transistors.

But in the end, much like serial ports, parallel ports and RTCs (AST SixPack Plus and later Super I/O chips), floating point coprocessors (8087, 80287, 80387 disappeared at the 486) and sound cards (Soundblasters), graphics will be part of the CPU or motherboard.

Discrete graphics will be a very small market.

[Josh Warner @ Sep 19th 2007 5:14PM]

I'm going to go ahead and assume you were serious. See JDizzle's posts below; my 300 Ohm Sennheiser HD580's don't have a chance of being driven by an onboard solution - anything short of a breakout box won't cut it.

Nevermind the fact that a mobo is a terrible place for audio - EFI flying around all over the place, everything operating in the digital domain... onboard audio cards typically do not report their essential stats (freq response, S/N ratio, THD, IMD, dynamic range, max output) because they are so dismal. (See: Bose, but that's another discussion).

Anybody that wants anything approaching 'decent' quality out of integrated sound is dreaming. PCI cards are an improvement, but offboard DACs are the best.


Moving on to GPUs - dunno if you've noticed, but the topography of a GPU is wildly different than a CPU. Ever run a test like 3DMark? One of the tests shuts off the GPU and lets the CPU take over - the framerate drops from "smooth" to about 1 fps. CPU's are not massively parallel rendering engines and cannot fill that market.

Do some research/know what you're talking about before posting.

[sr @ Sep 19th 2007 4:18PM]

Good. We need some competition in discrete graphics since just like in Processors, AMD has nothing here again leaving nVidia with a defacto monopoly. It would be nice if someone with some competence could make PC processors to compete with Intel also, since AMD certainly isn't doing it.

[JDizzle @ Sep 19th 2007 4:23PM]

Well although almost all motherboards have integrated audio, that doesn't mean that there's no market for soundcards. Most serious gamers and audiophiles I know use Creative X-Fi cards as opposed to the integrated sound found on their motherboard. Although the integrated audio isn't terrible, the quality just can't be compared to a real soundcard like a Creative X-Fi.

The same thing goes for video, there are a fair number of low end motherboards which have integrated graphics, but it is not comparable to even the extremely low-end video cards. I just don't think video will be integrated into the motherboard with high quality anytime soon (5 years max :P)

[Ray-- @ Sep 19th 2007 4:32PM]

most serious gamers use headphones... i dont know why you need an X-FI for "sound quality". Thats a dumb argument... creative is a bunch of overpriced over marketed crap... they *will* be obsolete.

[JDizzle @ Sep 19th 2007 4:42PM]

Of course most serious gamers use headphones, I personally own $100 headphones just for gaming, (not that I'm proud to say they cost $100 :P), but if you've ever compared a set of high-end headphones, maybe the Sennheiser HD-280Pro for example, with integrated motherboard sound and with a Creative X-Fi or any somewhat high-end soundcard you WILL notice a difference, usually a considerably large difference in quality at that.

[mr nimblewick @ Sep 19th 2007 4:25PM]

Great, more complicated, over-priced, over-powered graphics chips with names like HYX3000X Turbo.

Just what was needed.

[Maff @ Sep 19th 2007 4:43PM]

the graphics processing will take place within a core of the processor, that's the way the market i belive is heading, as with the ATI and AMD merger, cooler, quieter multi core chips that handle graphics and general cpu duties WILL be the next gen

[drew @ Sep 19th 2007 4:29PM]

and they just bought Havok physics engine... hmmmmmm...

[Erik @ Sep 19th 2007 4:32PM]

Frankly, I'd prefer them to concentrate on higher-end integrated graphics. For the most part, I'm not going to need 256 or 512MB of dedicated memory for my daily tasks. However, when I feel like playing Half-Life 2 (which my computer keeps crashing), I'd like to know my GPU is able to keep pace when I need it to.

[Liam Billington @ Sep 19th 2007 5:19PM]

Urgh don't believe the hype... haven't they have been promising this for years with increased super-de-duper increased performance than the last generation of intergrated graphics. Erm... yes, but the games industry also moves on and so does the requirements for games.

[dave @ Sep 19th 2007 5:21PM]

People seem to be forgetting that Intel has attempted this a few times before, and always failed. In the last 10 years this must be the third or fourth time I've heard "Intel's finally going to pose some competition to 3dfx/Riva/Nvidia/ATI" and "Intel is for the first time looking at non-integrated graphics chips". i740 and i820 come to mind.

[allenvanhellen @ Sep 19th 2007 7:16PM]

PC Audio vs. 3d graphics :: apples and oranges... at least so far.

If you use the integrated audio's digital output, what quality problems could remain? The stats ARE there: 5.1 (or more) channels, 96k or 192k sampling rate, 24 bits per sample. Want better quality? Use better speakers or headphones, upgrade your amp, etc...

The only reason that integrated graphics tend to 'suck' is that so far, most systems have lacked the horsepower to play advanced games. The stats ARE NOT there: low polygon count, etc... If you only need to type and surf the web, they'll do fine.

The PC audio area doesn't need much improvement, while the 3d graphics area is constantly trying to become more and more real: pushing the polygon count, texture quality, filtering, etc... Maybe one day, the advances will slow because they've come far enough, and then cheap, integrated graphics will cut the mustard (case in point: no one needs PCI DVD decoder cards anymore). Maybe then, the only graphics 'cards' will be for special use, analogous to soundcards that offer multitracking for musicians.

[Wwhat @ Sep 19th 2007 9:08PM]

This does coincidentally tie in with the projected move of game graphics to real-time raytracing it seems.
(The move to raytracing gaming was also hinted at by MS too, so it seems a real plan it seems)

[Matt @ Sep 19th 2007 11:42PM]

Mohr's Law...
Double the transistor count every year, i don't see it being too long before we have whole desktop "system on chip" designs (including all the RAM, sound, graphics, controllers, etc.) The only thing needing to be separate is storage space, and only because it is the "fat" of the system. Sure, dedicated will be better for a long time, but it is inevitable, discrete everything will eventually go for the PC, and will be left to the specialty markets.

[Tyler Ransom @ Sep 20th 2007 1:50AM]

Don't you mean ATI?? OR am I not up to date with the high end GPU makers these days?????

[Ebzy @ Sep 20th 2007 8:21AM]

In case you are not up to date:
AMD bought out ATi