As previously mentioned, INTEL is trying to bring GFX calculations back to the CPU system. Their argumentation for this is

(…) that Intel processors offered “more bang for the buck” and that it was more economical to go from single to multiple core processors versus popping multiple graphics cards into a machine.  “The fact of the matter is that you’re going to have one graphics card, you may have a dual graphics card, but you’re not going to have a four graphics card or eight graphics card system,” said Fosner.

(…) 

This quote comes from this tgdaily article about an interview they had with INTEL on the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. The real-time demo shows 8 hardware thread on 4 cores in action. It's based on a game-engine framework called "Smoke Framework" and currently it's using OGRE3D for rendering.

INTEL is considering to release the sourcecode to the developer community as stated on the OGRE3D forum. As the OGRE3D community is currently working on DX10 support, the Smoke Framework probably will continue using OGRE.

There are two videos available about the demo and the interview - one is the article mentioned above but I'll list them both here again:

• People “probably won’t” need discrete graphics cards anymore
• Intel shows off Nehalem’s power with fire and smoke

Somehow related to the topic:

• SwiftShader - a software rasterizer fpr Dx9 and Shader 2.0

Steve Streeting, the founder and main maintainer of OGRE3D, has revealed on what he was working since he left his job for doing full-time Ogre-related work. It’s a real-time cloud rendering system and it looks …. wow !

Here the product page of Nimble (Tm), and here more screenshots and a short video. It seems that it has been licensed for a game already: ‘Alliance‘.

Btw. in this context I also revisited the terragen site after a longer while. We have licensed version 1 and now I am looking on some example images of version 2 and sometimes there is no way I can distinct if from real photos!