Intel demos Larrabee

World+dog can now say: " I told you so " but in fact it's a pretty sad state of affairs. 2 things could be going on:
1) The stuff is just not up to scratch, and won't be for quite some time.
2) Intel, as per usual, is arrogant and doesn't want to share nor hype up the masses before the biggest product launch they've had since Pentium Pro.

/me recons its the mix of both.

If we go back in time a few years to when the Geforce 4 Titanium cards where raining supreme. Creative Labs bought a struggling 3D-Labs company and prepared silicon of their new gaming graphics card. It was to have PS and VS 2.0 and be better (because ATI and nVidia were still running PS 1.3/1.4)and faster than anything else. Then ATI launched the R200 aka the Radeon 9700 and it was so fast that nVidia realed in disbelief and the Creative Labs guys realized that their silicon couldn't compete, so they kiboshed it. The hardware still surfaced as a workhorse chip for CAD workstations and then soon disappeared into obscurity.

Travelling back even further before Texture and Lighting Transform was added as a hardware feature (aka Geforce 1) Intel had the half-decent i740 discrete graphics cards. In interviews across the web and magazines Intel boldly told us how their new chip the i810 would be an amazing chip, faster and more feature laden than anything else. When it finally was introduced it was no longer a discrete solution and became part of the integrated crap that's been in Intel's chipsets for the last 12 years.

Now again Intel is threatening to unveil a superior platform, and while it may do ray-tracing in real time, the question is can it do it fast enough for 140 MegaPixels rendered onscreen per second? (1920x1200x60) Yes it may indeed be as fast as nVidia's and AMD's solutions but it'll likely be a one time deal and then it too will fade into obscurity as the constant product refreshes the Red and Green team will quickly pass it by. It will likely be a CAD/3D Studio Max workstation card only.

you missend probably the most important one

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/09/400&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=804

I want x86 to die not only because it is ugly, but also because it is too proprietary.
There is no real competition in x86 market.
So the last thing i'd like to see is graphics extension of x86.
Intel can afford to loose tons of cash on this project since they want to be The Only chipmaker on planet. They trying to get to mobile market and it will be another disaster from consumer point of view.
As I can see it, it's not going to success in first round or two anyway, but then they can push it with PR and dirty deals.

Has the INQ been fed old news?!

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,646920/Video-shows-ray-traced-Quake-Wars/News/

You waste a paycheck on a video game
Lined up out the door like The Stones are in town
There ain't enough Chippie arse whippin's
To go round

I got combat training for all crysises
Now I'm the bouncer of the anti-x86's
But they couldn't torture me half as well
As them little birthday $@*#*@*$!
In Compiler Cheese Hell

Re: Glenn

1. First, it's Geforce 256, not Geforce 1. there is no such thing as Geforce 1.

2. i740 wasn't released to compete with Geforce 256- it was to compete against nVidia TNT (yes, the first TNT) and Voodoo 1/2. You know when i740 was released? 1998. You know when Geforce 256 was released? End of 1999.

*roll eyes*

3. Even when the i810 was announced, no one in their right mind think that it could compete against discrete cards of that day. People still remember the lackluster performance of i740. So when Intel announced i810 (for Pentium III), everyone knew that the only thing its gonna beat was all those S3 integrated chipsets (please no Aladin TNT integrated chipset comparison, thanks). Intel only claimed to be faster than those.

Geforce 1 I meant by the original Geforce cards, yes they were called the 256 and came in two flavors, namely with SDR and DDR.

The i740 wasn't built to compete with the TNT either. Nvidia's top of the line chip at the time the i740 was intro'd was the Riva 128ZX. ATI had the awful Rage Pro, PowerVR had the PCX2, and Voodoo 1st generation were also out. The TNT was the first graphics cards released by Nvidia with single mass multi-texturing, something Voodoo could do and something Intel couldn't. The only reason I mentioned the Geforce is because many people here likely don't remember anything prior to Geforce.

I simply was referencing interviews from the old BOOT era, prior to Maximum PC with various spin doctors from Intel and Creative Labs. I've been building computers since 1993 commercially.