Thanks for the info, someday i'll get around to digging into hlsl enough to actually understand...If you read Beyond3D or Tomf's blog then you probably already heard of INTEL's project 'larrabee'. If not: the basic idea is to mix CPU and GPU functionality into one 'multi mini-core' system. One could call that "CGPU". The target for 2009 is up to 16 cores (maybe less) with each capable of 4 hardware threads.
The source article ends with:
Now do you understand why AMD had to buy ATI to survive?
In the context of the mixed architecture that might be more flexible to to program, raytracing (as alternatives to rasterasation) for real-time rendering is discussed. Another citation from the above article is
Now do you see why Nvidia is dead?
Maybe you know about Mental Images, the creator of the famous MentalRay offline renderer that ships with 3dsMax, Maya and XSI … … they have been bought by NVIDIA! Nvidia does provide with Gelato another rendering product for the DCC market but maybe their acquisition was also interesting for them in regards to the Intel's Larrabee project where raytracing for real-time (RTRT) is researched.
So what will the future bring us? Maybe instead of 2 pairs of separate competitors 'AMD<->INTEL and NVIDIA<->ATI' we will have a triangle 'INTEL<->NVIDIA<->AMD/ATI' ?
( P.s. Actually, as I am right now discovering, Larrabeee details are already public since April 2006 )
Comment by cb — Thursday, 10th January, 2008 @ 09:48
Comment by Patrick Hogenboom — Friday, 11th January, 2008 @ 11:35
[...] I mentioned that Intel, Nvidia and AMD/ATI are trying to expand to each others application domains (CPU und GPU fusion, a demo with OGRE3D and Nvidia's expansions). One may think that it's about market share [...]
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