Intel squares up with Larrabee

摘要

Nvidia and ATI's 3D graphics hardware and approach to rendering have dominated the market for the past few years. Intel's integrated graphics chipsets have been comparatively weak performers, although these are currently found in more computers than those of its competitors. Intel is hoping to change this when it launches a discrete graphics card next year, codenamed Larrabee, and leapfrog the two better-established names in graphics.rnLarrabee is currently the subject of a lot of interest, as it throws out the rulebook of GPU design. Rather than rendering scenes using specialised graphics hardware, as with today's graphics cards, Larrabee will use a software renderer, spreading the load across a parallel array of x86 processor cores, with cache-coherent memory.