INTEL’S GRAPHICS PLANS
Remember Larrabee, Intel’s last grand plan for graphics domination? That was based on a radical new approach to graphics processing. In simple terms, Intel planned to use its chip-production technology advantage to cram scores of small x86 CPU cores into a single chip, and use brute force to render fast 3D graphics. The idea was to launch consumer graphics cards using Larrabee chips in 2010.
That never happened. Turns out, even with the might of Intel’s chip fabs behind the idea, Larrabee was simply going to be too slow. Indeed, it’s an indication of just how hard it is to break into the high-performance 3D rendering market that even Intel majorly misjudged its entry. So, once bitten, twice shy? Not for Intel. Getting into graphics is simply too important, what with the money in the consumer PC market increasingly moving into relatively high- end performance and gaming rigs, while basic all-purpose PCs continue to be replaced by other general-purpose computing devices, such as tablets and phones.
So, it arguably shouldn’t be a surprise that Intel has announced plans to have another crack at discrete PC graphics. This time, Intel is serious. It says it intends to create a full top-to-bottom GPU family, including genuine highperformance graphics for gaming PCs. To do that, it has pulled off something of a corporate coup. Intel has lured AMD’s chief graphics guru, Raja Koduri, who joins Intel and goes straight in as senior vice president of the Core and Visual Computing Group, and chief architect of its graphics products.
Currently, the time frames and basic nature of Intel’s plans for in-house graphics are unclear. The new AMD Inside processor indicates that Intel knows it will be some time before it can insert its own graphics tech into such a chip, however. That leaves the big question of whether Intel will be using Koduri’s brains to come up with something new, or take its existing Gen 9 integrated graphics and scale it into something that can compete with the big boys. It will probably be getting on for five years before we know if Intel’s latest play for graphics domination is a goer.