Watch Intel's First Demo of Larrabee GPGPU
Larrabee's raytracing Quake Wars: Enemy Territory!
While Intel makes many chips and technologies for all sorts of computing, its known for its CPUs. Now Intel is ready to take on a whole new challenge in the area of graphics with its upcoming Larrabee GPU.
Larrabee's raison d'être is to give Intel something to push back with against AMD and Nvidia. It won't be a direct competitor to Radeons and GeForces, as Larrabee is fundamentally different from present GPUs on the market
Notably, Larrabee's architecture is based off the Pentium P54C design and will use the x86 instruction set. The nature of the design makes Larrabee better suited to the term of the GPGPU. Larrabee is expected to function as a modest rasterizer, but could have the edge the computationally-heavy method of raytracing.
At IDF 2009, Intel made its first public demonstration of Larrabee – running on a Gulftown system, no less. Check it out in the video embedded below:

Rasterisation is great but for effects like shadows and mirrors it is a real mess. Processing requirements also scale linearly hence these ridiculous graphics cards. Rasterisation just lacks the realism of ray tracing. Developers have to do so much work with rasterisation to get all those nice effects and they can't do every surface.
Ray tracing engines will change all this and the developer will simply define transparency, reflectivity etc. rather than having to create them by hand.
Essentially raytracing is a more physics like approach treating the simulation like it is in the real world.
Besides, Intel made no attempt to promote this as a high-end/enthusiast product. So why is there a straight presumption that it will be? It won't. They are aiming for the mainstream market, NOT the top end. (Don't be surprised that ATI and Nvida will own Intel on the performance side in 2010...In fact, I know they will.)
Dont get me wrong, AMD's 5870 demo with Crysis on Eyefinity was much more impressive to me. That and the fact that AMD's card hits 2.72 terraflops on a single chip, while Larrabee is targeting a measly 1 terraflop.
who said anything about cheaper???? to me this looks like its gona be more expensive, plus i think theyd probably sell most builds if not all builds with discrete graphics only. however this does depend on how much larabee actually benchmarks, "give time, time".
Of course, Larrabee will have to do rasterizing too, regardless of whether or not RTRT makes any headway.
If i heard correctly on the video, they re-rendered a scene (map?) using Raytracing alone for lights and reflections adding another process for it, that's pretty impressive... Too bad it has so low FPS for a *gamer* to care. It has some impressive capabilities for rendering though, hope Intel puts more juice for gamers to care.
i mean they already announced 22nm for 2011, that is really impressive.
didn't they say they would totally own Ati/Nvidia?
or was that with something else?