Looks like Intel smells money in GPU's. That could mean great things for PC gamers...not necessarily from Larrabee, but from the fact that they see a future for PC gaming! And its just in time for COD5: Future War or whatever the IW geniuses have in store for us.



Intel (NSDQ:INTC) wants to get back into the discrete graphics game and on Monday revealed some details about how it plans to get there within the next couple of years with a family of products and development tools codenamed Larrabee.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant will officially present a paper on "a many-core visual computing architecture" at the SIGGRAPH 2008 conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 12 but has already placed the paper online.

Intel on Monday said the first Larrabee-based product will be released "in 2009 or 2010." That unspecified device "will target the personal computer graphics market" but Intel promised applications for Larrabee that go beyond traditional graphics processing and pledged to build the infrastructure and ecosystem necessary for an ambitious plan to blend linear and parallel computing on entirely x86-based hardware platforms.

"It's shaping up to be an interesting product. We won't know where it scales in terms of performance until we have hardware in hand, but they've taken a number of steps to make it fit into the market," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

According to the analyst, Intel's Larrabee presentation is lighter on more "esoteric" details previously emphasized by the chip maker and more focused on appealing to potential developers by promising support for existing graphics APIs like Direct X and OpenGL.

The term "ray tracing," for example, is noticeably downplayed in the paper and accompanying press statements from Intel. Ray tracing is a technique that "traces" the path of light through objects to produce a higher degree of photorealism than is possible with traditional raster-based graphics. The downside -- mainstream graphics processors lack the horsepower to perform such work efficiently in real time.

Intel had in the recent past highlighted the ray tracing capabilities of Larrabee, promising to produce a product that can perform such graphically intense calculations but at an acceptable computational cost. At the company's recent Research@Intel Day, Intel CTO Justin Rattner made ray tracing the central theme in his comments about Larrabee, but the SIGGRAPH paper doesn't mention the subject until more than half the way through.

For now, the focus is on Larrabee as a potential threat, albeit a distant one, to the discrete graphics products made by Nvidia (NSDQ:NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD). Nvidia, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., is the market leader in discrete graphics cards for PCs and dominates the high end with its GeForce line of products. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD's ATI division is second overall and enjoys the strongest sales of its Radeon products in the more price-conscious segment of the market.

Intel remains the market leader in shipments of graphics hardware, due to the huge numbers of motherboards it ships featuring integrated graphics chipsets. The overwhelming majority of computers sold worldwide come with graphics hardware that taps into the same available memory as the central processor rather than one or more discrete graphics cards with separate, dedicated graphics memory.

But the increasing demands on graphics hardware by modern PC user interfaces, rich media applications and mainstream gaming has helped Nvidia become a genuine semiconductor powerhouse, while Intel's main CPU rival AMD bought its own large footprint in the discrete graphics market with its 2006 acquisition of ATI.

Intel's strategy, some years in the making, has been to develop its own discrete graphics unit in-house rather than acquiring one, according to McCarron.

"It's very clear that some time ago, say two or three years ago -- and keep in mind that back then we were hearing rumors that Intel was looking at ATI or Nvidia [as possible acquisitions] -- but back then the decision was clearly made to develop this expertise in house," the analyst said.

By the way, this news of Larrabee comes at a time when there's a lot of rumors swirling around nVidia (though nVidia is claiming they're baseless):



Nvidia (NSDQ:NVDA) has asked Digitimes for "a full retraction" of a story appearing Friday in the tech journal that claims the Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip maker "has decided to throw in the towel and quit the chipset business."

"[S]ources close to the situation at one of Taiwan's top motherboard makers" told Digitimes of a meeting earlier this week between Nvidia and its motherboard partners in which the discrete graphics leader hoped to "gauge support for it continuing to develop chipsets in the future," reports Digitimes' Ricky Morris.

"The motherboard makers' response? Silence," he writes on the Taipei, Taiwan-based journal's Website.

But Nvidia is fighting the rumor in no uncertain terms. A spokesperson fired off an unsolicited e-mail to ChannelWeb and other media organizations Friday, claiming the story to be "false" and "groundless."

"This story is false and we have asked Digitimes for a full retraction," writes Nvidia's Bryan Del Rizzo in the e-mail.

He further describes the story as "completely groundless," adding, "We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business. In fact, our MCP business is as strong as it has ever been for bothAMD (NYSE: AMD) and Intel (NSDQ:INTC) platforms.

"Mercury Research has reported that the Nvidia market share of AMD platforms in Q2 '08 was 60 percent. We have been steady in this range for over two years. Contrary to popular perception, we have not lost any ground to AMD, despite their chipset introductions over the last year or so."

Digitimes has not retracted the story, though it does mention Nvidia's objection to its claims. Del Rizzo's particular reference to Nvidia's position versus Advanced Micro Device's line of 7-series chipsets seems to stem from Morris' claim that "[r]eception to the nForce 200 chip (BR04) which will enable SLI technology on Intel X58 motherboards has been lukewarm at best, with many makers saying they will not bother adding the chip on their boards."

Digitimes further cites sources who say some Taiwanese motherboard makers "have already canceled upcoming high-end motherboard projects based on the nForce 7-series chipset."

The journal also opines that Nvidia will have to "find a way of licensing and enabling multi-GPU support on motherboards using Intel and/or AMD chipsets fast" or risk having "to cede the top-end of the graphics card market to AMD, which now has the benefit of CrossFire."

Del Rizzo's e-mail counters by citing a favorable Tom's Hardware review of Nvida's nForce 790i SLI and concludes by saying the company "is looking forward to bring new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms."

Meanwhile, a recent rumor that Apple is going somewhere besides Intel for its MacBook chipsets has led to speculation that Nvidia, AMD or VIA might be the new provider. Digitimes claims its Nvidia chipset news "would also debunk" the idea that Nvidia is in the theoretical running for a chipset partnership with Apple.

For the record, all companies recently contacted by ChannelWeb about the MacBook rumor -- including Apple (NSDQ:AAPL), Intel, Nvidia, AMD and VIA -- offered some variation of the same response: No comment.

One Apple reseller ChannelWeb spoke to said it was unlikely Apple would reveal the hardware in its next generation of MacBooks "until the very last minute." A new line of Apple notebooks is expected to be released in six to eight weeks, according to reports.

"I'll probably find out what's under the hood of the new MacBooks from you guys in the press before Apple tells me," said Michael Oh, president of Tech Superpowers in Boston.