Intel's Larrabee makes public debut

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Intel today demonstrated its Larrabee multi-core system for the first time.

At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, senior research scientist Bill Marks introduced the long-awaited Larrabee, saying he was “super-excited with progress” on the multi-core x86 graphics system.

"I’m very excited about what it’s going to do, and it’s really great to have the hardware up and running,” he said.

In the demo, the system ran a short segment of a game called Quake Wars. "This is running on early silicon, but we've got ray-tracing running in real time. It allows you to simulate the interaction of light and matter in a way that’s really accurate, and makes it very easy to get effects like shadow and reflection," Marks said.

"We rebuild the key data structures every frame, using task parallelism – showing that you can do the same type of things you do on a multi-core CPU but with even more parallelism."

He added: "To do something like this on a conventional GPU would be really quite painful."

That said, the short demo wasn't very complicated and involved little movement, much of which was choppy.

When asked by journalists if he could outline the process technology, marketing vice president Sean Maloney said "no."

"We showed you what we showed you," he added.

He did add that Intel still intends a standalone product for Larrabee, but wasn't releasing any other details at the moment.

Marks noted that there are already publicy available SDKs for the system, with development systems already shipping. The system isn't set for arrival until next year.

Click here for more news from the Intel Developer Forum 2009.

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