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Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.

DreamWorks specifically mentioned Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor and Larrabee graphics chip as reasons for the switch.

Intel and DreamWorks announced Tuesday that they had formed a strategic alliance for 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks plans to produce all its feature films in stereoscopic 3D--which requires the viewer to wear special glasses for enhanced 3D--beginning next year. Intel will provide DreamWorks with "the latest high-performance processing technologies, including future chips with multiple processing cores," the companies said.

This is a setback for AMD. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker rolled out its quad-core Barcelona last year at George Lucas' Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco to make a point: Barcelona would be big player in the movie industry. But a series of delays related to a processor bug put a damper on the high expectations for Barcelona.

"AMD maintained a long and fruitful relationship with DreamWorks Animation, beginning in early 2005. Earlier this year, AMD and DreamWorks decided not to extend our marketing and technology relationship. However, DreamWorks Animation is still an important and respected AMD customer and we look forward to having the opportunity to work with them again in the future," AMD said in a statement.

Essentially, DreamWorks looked down the road and liked what it saw coming from Intel better. "When we look at the Intel roadmap, it is more closely aligned with our needs," John Batter, president of production at DreamWorks Animations, said during a conversation with Nanotech: The Circuits blog. "The rendering times have been going up because of the complexity and richness of the images. Then you layer on top of that 3D. Something that's already growing--and doubling it."

Intel had the best technology, Batter said. "You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs."

DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.

He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."

DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores.

Intel Nehalem architecture

(Credit: Intel)

Batter specifically mentioned both Nehalem and Larrabee as a reason for the switch to Intel. He said that Larrabee would be "complementary" to Intel's general-purpose CPUs.

Nehalem is due in the fourth quarter of this year and Larrabee is expected in the 2009-2010 time frame.

The first Intel-Dreamworks release will be Monsters vs. Aliens, which is slated to hit movie theaters in March 2009.

Advanced Micro Devices' bet on a new approach to graphics chip design appears to be paying off, according to analyst Jon Peddie. This could put AMD's ATI graphics chip unit on top again--or at least on equal footing with Nvidia, the graphics leader over the last few years.

Peddie heads Tiburon, Calif.-based Jon Peddie Research, which specializes in graphics chip market research.

Test reports on AMD's and Nvidia's newest graphics chips are pouring in. Both companies are racking up good scores. (See Diamond Viper Radeon HD 4850 review here.)

But beyond the day-to-day test scores, AMD's ATI graphics chip unit may be winning the longer strategic battle. ATI has gambled on a radically different strategy for its latest series of chips--the HD 4850, HD 4870, and upcoming dual-chip R700.

"(AMD) is starting in the middle of the market and scaling up. That's a break with tradition," said Peddie. "We always started at the very, very tippy-top and build the most powerful thing you could and then let it scale down over time."

But Peddie said this traditional approach just isn't practical anymore. "The chipsets keep getting larger and larger despite the fact that we were going to smaller and smaller (manufacturing) process nodes. The chips grew faster than the process nodes shrunk and the consequences of that is that the power consumption went up, the costs went up, and it got to the point where it's kind of impractical to continue along that way," he said.

In essence, AMD's ATI unit strategy is to build smaller, less power-hungry chips and then gang them up to get better performance. Nvidia's strategy has been to build one large, extremely fast--and extremely power hungry--chip.

For ATI, the execution of this chip-ganging strategy is the key. And this is where ATI appears to have been successful. "The inter-processor communications. Getting that to work has been the trick. This is what ATI has done. They've come up with this stellar way of doing inter-processor communications so they can in fact get the scaling," according to Peddie.

And there's more than meets the eye. ATI has also cut in half the number of bits in the memory interface, Peddie said: down to 256 bits while Nvidia has remained at 512. "That has the benefit to ATI of reducing a big hunk of the power consumption."

Peddie said in the past this kind of approach would have been suicidal because it would have decimated ATI's test scores. "The argument against this is that graphics performance is a function of memory," he said. "Typically you want wider and wider (bit width)."

But ATI has countered this by using the fastest memory standard available. "So to compensate for shrinking down the bit width, ATI has jumped to the next-generation in memory design called GDDR5. GDDR5 is approximately three times faster than GDDR3--which is what Nvidia is still using and what ATI uses on their smaller cards," according to Peddie.

"So with three times the speed but half the width, they end up with 1.5 times the processing capability with the memory."

"A very clever thing that they did but mind you it was a gamble that looks like it's going to pay off," he said.

ATI has more processing units than Nvidia inside its chip too. "The other thing is that ATI has 800 processors in their chip and Nvidia has 240. That has a processor count advantage," Peddie said.

Though it remains to be seen if this advantage is borne out in testing over time, he added. "Nvidia and ATI keep improving their drivers so they'll seesaw back and forth with their scores, almost from week to week."

But in the long run, Nvidia may be forced to adopt ATI's strategy to keep pace in these week-to-week battles. "If ATI is successful, as we expect that to be, then Nvidia will have no choice but to adopt (ATI's) approach, just out of practicality," Peddie said. "It just makes a whole lot of sense."

AMD-ATI's upcoming R700 (rumored to be called the 4870 X2) two-chip graphics board will be the ultimate test of this strategy.

"It's a new proprietary inter-processor communication technology. If they put these two chips on one board and it does scale properly, then they have pulled off a coup," he said.

"When you gang up graphics chips (using the traditional Scalable Link Interface or CrossFire technologies) they roll off pretty fast. ("Roll off" implies that performance doesn't scale up well.) "So when you put two boards in, you don't get twice the performance but you (only) get one and a half. You put four boards in and you (only) get about 1.7, 1.8. What ATI is saying is that with two chips using (their) proprietary inter-bus, they will get 1.8 (the performance) with two chips. If that's true, you can expect to see four of them giving you something around 2.5."

Getting 2.5 times the performance from four boards would be a masterstroke for ATI.

The previous ATI dual-chip solution was very different, Peddie said. "The HD 3870 X2 was not a proprietary bus but a CrossFire connection. The CrossFire connection and the SLI connection are at the very, very end of the pipeline. Not the most efficient place to do an inter-processor communication. That's one of the reasons ATI has abandoned it."

AMD's ATI unit is also better positioned than it was before in manufacturing. "Part of the reason that Nvidia has been ahead is that ATI has been suffering over the last three or four years with manufacturing problems. It's not that ATI didn't have a good chip, the problem was that ATI couldn't build enough of them."

This should change with the newest series of chips. "This (design)--so they say--will really go into high-volume production." Though he cautioned this still remains to be seen.

"The (new ATI chip) is a really efficient, tight design. They used to do this all the time but they kind of got off that trail. And now they're back on it."

Nvidia has announced it will release a graphics chip that matches Advanced Micro Device's manufacturing process--an advantage that the latter has often touted.

Board using Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ chip

(Credit: Nvidia)

The Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+, announced Thursday, is made on a 55-nanometer process. Current Nvidia processors--including the just-released GTX 200 series--are made on a slightly "fatter" 65nm process. AMD has moved most of its graphics chips to a 55nm process.

Typically, the smaller the process, the more energy-efficient a processor is. Smaller processes also typically offer better performance. Tech Web site PC Perspective has photos showing that the chip package is smaller than a 65nm Nvidia part.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be competitively priced. "It's an enthusiast category graphics product, but it's going to be offered at $229 when it hits retail next month," said Ken Brown, an Nvidia spokesperson. It is slated to hit retail shelves on July 14.

AMD introduced new Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 graphics chips on Monday. These will start at just less than $200 and range up to about $300, making the 9800 GTX+ a direct competitor.

(Update: PC Perspective had this to say about the HD 4850 versus the 9800 GTX+: "The AMD Radeon HD 4850 and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ appear to be nearly equally matched in price and performance." The HD 4850 is now being offered by resellers. Prices range roughly from $189 to $220.)

"We've come to expect these cunningly timed product announcements from Nvidia every time AMD announces a new Radeon graphics card, said CNET's Rich Brown in a post.

Specifications for the 9800 GTX+ include a core clock speed of 738MHz, a shader clock running at 1836MHz, and 512MB GDDR3 memory rated at 1100MHz. The prior-generation 9800 model had a core clock speed of 675MHz and a shader clock speed of 1688MHz.

The platform also supports adding a second or third 9800 GTX+ board using the Scalable Link Interface.

Support for game physics and transcoding is also key to the product. "One of the key differentiators is something we introduced with the GTX 260 and 280 (just released Monday) and is moving down through the rest of our product offerings--support for Physics and, with CUDA, it supports transcoding," Brown said.

CUDA is Nvidia's C language programming environment. Transcoding is the conversion of a movie, for example, from one format to another.

Intel Xeon processors--particularly the "Harpertown" variety--dominated the top 500 supercomputer list. But IBM's Power chips made a strong showing as usual at the very top of the list. AMD's Opteron processor landed in the No. 1 and No. 4 ranked systems.

Top 10 processors in Top500 supercomputer list

(Credit: Top500.org)

The Top500 List--updated twice a year--of supercomputers was released Wednesday. Intel's Xeon, AMD's Opteron, and IBM's Power chips vied for most of the spots in the list.

The most dominant chip was the Intel Xeon E54xx series "Harpertown" processor. Appearing in 116 systems for 23.2 percent of the total. The largest for any single processor model.

The Xeon 53xx series "Clovertown" processor was next, appearing in 92 systems for 18.4 percent of the total. Following Clovertown was the Xeon 51xx series "Woodcrest" processor with 18.2 percent of the total.

Harpertown and Clovertown are quad-core processors, Woodcrest is dual-core.

In the No. 4 slot was the AMD Opteron dual-core chip (8.4 percent), followed by the X54xx series of Intel Harpertown processors (7.8 percent), then by the PowerPC 440 (4.22 percent).

(Note: Combining the Intel Harpertown E54xx series and X54xx series boosts the total for this chip model to 31 percent.)

The IBM Power processors passed the AMD Opteron family and "are now (again) the second most common processor family with 68 systems (13.6 percent), up from 61 systems (12.2 percent) six months ago," Top500.org said.

AMD's strongest showing was in the top five supercomputers. Opteron processors played a major role in the No. 1 IBM Roadrunner system, which connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 IBM Cell chips (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers).

See: IBM's Roadrunner breaks petaflop barrier, tops supercomputer list.

The No. 4 Sun Microsystems' SunBlade system uses over 62,000 cores running inside AMD Opteron quad-core processors running at 2.0GHz.

The No. 2 and No. 3 systems were based on IBM PowerPC 450 chips.

Other Top500 processor highlights:

• A total of 375 systems (75 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is up from six months ago (354 systems, 70.8 percent) and represents the largest share for Intel chips in the Top500 ever.

• 56 systems (11 percent) are using AMD Opteron processors, down from 78 systems (15.6 percent) six months ago.

• 283 systems are using quad-core processor based systems.

UPDATE: On Monday, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia are launching graphics chips based on distinctly different design philosophies.

Nvidia chips are big and powerful

(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's GTX 280 and GTX 260 are designed to deliver the biggest performance bang per chip. A so-called "monolithic" approach packs 1.4 billion transistors and 240 processing cores onto one piece of silicon.

(See Peter Glaskowsky's review of the GTX 280.)

AMD's modular approach tends toward less is more: smaller, less power-hungry chips that can be strung together to achieve higher performance. The company plans to implement this strategy with the HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics processing units (GPUs) that are being introduced on Monday. (See "Notes" below.)

This design philosophy is based on the same multicore strategy now employed by AMD (and Intel) for the CPU, the main PC processor. Instead of making one chip bigger and faster, AMD boosts performance by stringing together multiple chips. This approach also allows a chipmaker to avoid the time and expense of designing separate processors for the midrange and very-high-end segments.

(Clarification: In the case of a CPU, a core refers to a "scalar" x86 processor core found, for example, in a quad-core Intel or AMD chip. The GPU core is a "parallel processing core." GPUs these days typically contain hundreds of these cores.)

"The beauty of this design is that it's scalable. You can put one or two (chips) on a board," said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing at AMD's Graphics Products Group.

In the midrange segment ($200 to $300) AMD uses a single chip--for example, an HD 4870. At the high-end ($500 and above), it adds another chip to scale up to better performance. This dual-chip design--code-named the R700--will be marketed as the 4870 X2.

On the other hand, Nvidia says its emphasis on a single, very-high-performance chip is necessary to keep it out front. "At the high end, there is no prize for second place," Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce products at Nvidia, said in an interview with Nanotech: The Circuits Blog last month.

(Nvidia also offers multichip designs, but it puts each chip on a separate board, while AMD puts two chips on one board.)

And Nvidia is trying to raise the bar with GTX 280. "We're rendering about 3 million triangles per frame," Curtis Beason, an engineer at Nvidia, said last month at an event where Nvidia previewed the GTX 280 chip.

AMD targets smaller chips that can be strung together to get better performance. AMD chip on left, Nvidia chip on right.

(Credit: AMD)

"With (the previous-generation) GeForce 8800, what we achieved is a very photorealistic character. Very detailed skin. But it was a single character," Jason Paul, the GeForce product manager, said at the Nvidia event last month. "With GTX 200 what we're moving to is multiple highly realistic characters."

Nvidia is also boasting that a dual-core GTX 280 can convert a high-definition movie into iPod video format in 35 minutes, compared to about five hours for a quad-core CPU system with low-end integrated graphics.

Hewlett-Packard's Voodoo unit will be one of the first to adopt the new Nvidia GPUs. "We are excited to be one of the first companies in the world to offer the technology in the new Exhilaration Edition of the...HP Blackbird 002," said Rahul Sood, chief technology officer, HP Voodoo Business Unit.

Notes: updated 6/16, 12:10 PM:

--AMD 4800 series processors will be available starting next week at Besy Buy, according to AMD VP Rick Bergman, speaking Monday at an AMD event. "In just a little over a week from today. You'll be able to walk into a Best Buy and buy this chip (4800 series) on a graphics board for about $200. A teraflop for $200," Bergman said. He added that systems will also be available from Falcon Northwest, Velocity Micro, and ibuypower. "We're also introducing a system that can take four of these boards," he said. "That's almost five teraflops of performance in a personal computer."

--Both AMD and Nvidia say their GPUs can achieve about one teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) of performance.

--Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 will retail for $649 and be available on graphics boards starting Tuesday. The GeForce GTX 260 will be priced at $399, with availability slated for June 26.

Nvidia is now firing back at Intel. The world's largest graphics chip maker has responded to Intel's latest statement on the USB 3.0 specification and said chipset maker SiS has also joined the group of companies at odds with Intel.

There are now four companies vying with Intel--all chipset makers: Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technologies, and SiS.

And they're moving quickly to establish their own so-called "host controller" specification. "We're moving fast. We've already staffed it internally. We have resources submitted from all of the companies (Nvidia, AMD, Via, and SiS)," said a source from Nvidia who asked to remain anonymous.

A host controller allows computer devices to communicate with the operating system and is a crucial component for implementing USB 3.0 on computer systems.

An Intel spokesperson posted a blog on Wednesday stating Intel's position on the release of the host controller specification related to USB 3.0.

Intel stated emphatically that the host controller is outside the scope of the USB 3.0 specification and that the company is under no obligation to release the specification before it deems the specification ready for release. Moreover, because Intel is giving it away for free, chipset makers shouldn't complain, the blog said.

Nvidia counters that if it doesn't get the specification from Intel in a timely manner--meaning now--the group members will be forced to come up with their own host controller, causing a cascade of potential delays. "Effectively, what will end up happening as this plays out (is) the rest of us launch later. But even though we've developed to the Intel host controller spec, we may not interpret it exactly the same way as Intel has implemented it."

This will lead to further delays, according to Nvidia. "By then, they have become the de facto standard and we have no choice but to go back and respin (redesign) the chip, which then adds another nine months," Nvidia says. "Effectively, Intel is building in two years of green field--of a market where they're the sole provider and they can charge whatever they want for their chipsets."

Nvidia also took exception to this statement by Intel: "Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man-hours) in resources to create an Intel host controller spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology."

"I think they're overstating the resources and time required to get to a mature spec," said the Nvidia source.

Intel is expected to bring out low-cost quad-core processors in the third quarter to compete with AMD's triple-core Phenom chip. One site is also posting specifications for upcoming Nehalem processors.

The Core 2 Quad Q8000 series will include the Q8200, which will be priced as low as $203, according to Chinese-language technology Web site HKEPC.

Tech Web site The Inquirer also cited an Intel slide with the processor.

The 45-nanometer Q8000 series will be relatively low performance and stripped down, running at a clock speed of only 2.33GHz and integrating only 4MB of cache memory.

The currently shipping Intel quad-core processor that comes closest to this is the popular Q6600, which runs at 2.4GHz and packs 8MB of cache memory. This is priced at $224. Typically, the more cache memory integrated into a processor, the better the performance.

An Intel Q8000 quad-core chip priced at $203 would still be more expensive, however, than an AMD triple-core Phenom. A triple-core Phenom processor 8750 (2.4GHz) is listed on AMD's processor pricing page at $195. The Phenom 8650 (2.3GHz) is listed at $165 and the Phenom 8450 (2.1GHz) at $145.

The price difference between a system using a Phenom and one based on a Core 2 Quad is typically even more stark at first-tier vendors like Hewlett-Packard, where it can be as much as $300. Presumably, a system with a Q8000 quad-core processor would fall below the Q6600-based system in price.

HKEPC is also posting specifications on Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor, which is based on a new architecture featuring a high-speed data transfer technology called QuickPath (PDF).

At least three Nehalem "Bloomfield" quad-core processors are slated for the fourth quarter, with speeds ranging between 2.66GHz and3.2GHz, targeted at the mainstream and high end of the market. The processors will also use a new "X58" chipset, according to the report.

AMD will work with game giant Havok to tailor Havok's game technology to AMD processors, the companies said Thursday.

The plans call for optimizing game-physics effects utilizing AMD's multicore processors and graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Game physics brings the laws of physics--or physical-world simulation--to a game. For example, explosions may be modeled differently depending on the terrain.

Havok, which Intel acquired in September of last year, provides development tools and services used by digital-media creators. Havok's technology has been used in game titles such as BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, and has been used to create special effects in movies such as The Matrix and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Physics code has traditionally run on a CPU such as an AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processor. As part of the collaboration, Havok and AMD plan to further optimize Havok physics on AMD CPUs. Right now about 300 titles are optimized for Havok physics on the CPU, said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing at AMD's Graphics Products Group.

AMD wants to take this CPU-centric approach a step further, however, and optimize certain components on the GPU, as well. "The plan is to work with them to leverage the right pieces of the physics (technology) that can be accelerated on the GPU," Skynner said.

"The feedback that we consistently receive from leading game developers is that core game play simulation should be performed on CPU cores," said David O'Meara, managing director of Havok in a statement. "Beyond core simulation, however, the capabilities of massively parallel (GPU) products offer technical possibilities for computing certain types of simulation," he said.

AMD is chasing Nvidia, which acquired Ageia Technologies in February. Ageia's PhysX software is widely used, with more than 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and gaming PCs, according to Nvidia.

And Nvidia has said that the conversion of Ageia's physics application interface to Nvidia's CUDA C language environment is under way. This means users will be able to get the benefits of a physics accelerator via a software download, Nvidia said.

Intel issued a statement about USB 3.0, a subject threatening to cause a full-blown controversy among several chipmakers. The company also said it would present a paper on its upcoming "Larrabee" graphics technology in August.

The Intel statement on USB 3.0 is meant to clarify the difference between the basic USB specification and the "host controller specification"--the latter a point of dispute with rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia. The statement also tries to dispel rumors that Intel is "holding back the specification" from others in the industry.

AMD and Nvidia are claiming that Intel is trying to hijack the specification. Intel denies this.

USB 3.0 is a next-generation high-speed connection standard due in 2009. It is significant not only because all future PCs and devices will use connectors based on the standard, but also because it will offer 10 times the speed of USB 2.0--used in virtually all PCs introduced in the last few years--or roughly 5 gigabits per second.

"There has been a lot of unanswered speculation recently regarding USB 3.0 and Intel's involvement; I thought it was about time to set the record straight," Intel's Nick Knupffer said in a post Wednesday.

"Much of the incorrect speculation...so far has centered on what the USB 3.0 spec is, and who is creating it. There are two separate standards being developed, USB 3.0 and Intel's Host Controller spec in support of the USB 3.0 standard."

First, Knupffer wants to make it crystal-clear that the USB 3.0 is not an Intel specification. "It is being developed by the USB 3.0 Promoter Group (including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors, and Texas Instruments)...This spec is expected to be made publicly available by the USB 3.0 Promoter Group, along with an adopter agreement, early in the second half of 2008. (Very soon)."

Second, he describes the host controller specification, which has become a bone of contention with AMD and Nvidia. "Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man-hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology," he said.

"Think of the host controller spec as a Dummies guide to building a USB 3.0-compatible piece of silicon; it is NOT the USB 3.0 specification itself."

And here's the crux of the matter from Intel's standpoint: "The industry is keen to get this guide as it will allow them to build USB 3.0 compatible circuits without repeating the massive investment undertaken by Intel."

"Intel plans to make this spec available early in second half of 2008 with a no-royalty licensing obligation (Basically: free, gratis, unpaid, zero dollars, free of charge, at no cost, on the house)," he said.

Knupffer asserts that Intel is not holding back the specification, and he alludes to AMD and Nvidia. "No, Intel isn't holding back the specification...The impatience of our fellow chipset makers to leverage Intel's investment and begin to design great USB 3.0-supporting devices of their own is, however, very encouraging and should aid a fast USB 3.0 adoption ramp."

Finally, he refutes speculation that USB 3.0 is simply lifted from the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) specification, as AMD has claimed. "No, not true. The USB 3.0 specification has not borrowed heavily from the PCI (special-interest group)." PCI is a connection standard used in all PCs today.

Intel to detail future graphics technology in August

On another front, CTO Justin Rattner said Intel would detail its future Larrabee graphics chip in August, and he dropped more hints that the company is shifting its research focus away from traditional graphics to a technology known as ray tracing. Rattner was speaking at Intel R&D Day in Mountain View, Calif. on Wednesday.

Intel has demonstrated games running solely on multi-core CPUs (central processing units) using ray tracing. A rare feat because games are typically very GPU (graphics processing unit)-centric.

UPDATE: At the R&D Day, Intel demonstrated ray tracing on ET: Quake Wars running in basic HD (720p) resolution. The game was running at 14-29 frames per second in 1280x720 mode. The demonstration was done on a 16-core Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz.
(See Tom's Hardware)

"If you ever dived into a swimming pool or sea and looked up" you see a distorted world. "Now, ET: Quake Wars has the very same effect," according to Tom's Hardware.

The topics of ray tracing and Larrabee have triggered some debate with Nvidia, which currently favors more traditional raster-based graphics.

Intel said it would present a paper on its upcoming multi-core, x86-architecture-based Larrabee graphics chip at Siggraph in August. To date, information about Larrabee has been sketchy, tending toward broad statements about Intel's vision of where graphics technology is headed. Larrabee is expected sometime in the second half of 2009.

Rattner reiterated that Intel's vision means that today's graphics technology--based on rasterization--will become obsolete. Intel, however, emphasized that this vision is long-term.

"Ray tracing isn't about to extinguish rasterization any time soon, and our Larrabee product is designed with rasterization in mind...But the research possibilities are compelling," according to an Intel statement.