At the opening of its annual show IDF 2010 Intel wanted to demonstrate the power of its processors with a 3D ray tracing version of Wolfenstein game mode cloud, so with a large computing power line. Also on the menu for this gathering: the future family of processors Sandy Bridge.
Intel has launched its annual big show IDF 2010, where developers are invited but also serves to showcase U.S. company to showcase new media. For now, one of the most spectacular is a well known video game, Wolfenstein 3D, whose images were calculated with the method of ray tracing, or ray tracing.
The principle is different from the traditional method, called RIP, which is to build upon the display a raster image from its description in memory, which itself is vector. The ray tracing based on a more technical nature: the software launches virtual shelves on the scene, as they were leaving the eye of the beholder, and calculates the reflections and refractions that they suffer from touching objects, untilback to the light sources. Rendering, in particular reflections and transparencies, is much more realistic. In contrast, consumption of computing time is prohibitive for today's graphics cards. After a craze a few years ago and despite many means devised to reduce the number of calculations required, the method has not been imposed and still holds the rope RIP.
Intel has always had a weakness for this principle, precisely the demands of computing power, and therefore good big processors.At IDF 2010, visitors could watch this game in a beautiful demonstration of the ray tracing ... on a laptop. But it was linked to no fewer than four computers with Knights Ferry. This "daughter card" is derived from Larrabee, a high-end graphics card designed to compete with more powerful cards from nVidia and others who, after the game, have explored a new market, that of computer-aided design and workstations to large computational aids. The Larrabee project was abandoned this year but has risen this summer in a more sophisticated and far from the mainstream market: the big box contains a Knights Ferry 32 cores running at 1.2GHz, 8MB of cache and a 2 GB of RAM.
Sandy Bridge processors arrive
It should be four to operate in ray tracing a video game on the screen of a laptop ... With these 128 cores, Wolfenstein 3D was working smoothly (see video on YouTube). The demonstration of Intel is therefore that of cloud computing, where computing power is on remote servers online. Here, these computers providing real-time stream of images all made that the laptop had only to display. The link becomes the bottleneck. According to Intel, a game like this would work correctly with a line to 5 Mbps
As for processors, a conference presented the new architecture Sandy Bridge, which will be present on future processors marketed next year, etched in 32 nanometers. Note the integration of several circuits in this little box. Besides two or four cores are a PCI-Express (a principle already seen on the i5 Core), a DMI bus, and above all, a heart graphic, which according to Intel's claims, increases performance by 25 (compared to an Intel 2007). These circuits - including the heart graphic - can draw their data in a central L3 cache, all of which are connected by a ring bus, 96 Gbit / s. These beautiful graphics performance is a bit tarnished by the mere compatibility with the standard DirectX 10.1 and therefore incompatible with DirectX 11.
To further improve the speed, Intel uses an internal sort of overclocking the processor speeds up momentarily (or heart) after a period when he was at rest.
The first processors Sandy Bridge is planned for early 2011 in laptops. Because they require a motherboard change, they will appear only later on desktop computers.
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