Chip Wars
Intel Vs. AMD--In Pictures
Ed Sperling 06.16.08, 6:00 AM ET
The marketing wags are at it again, spreading confusion where there used to be lifelike clarity.
This time, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are waging war over graphics, and for the immediate future this will have nothing to do with anyone except Intel and AMD--and the folks over at Nvidia, who may incur some collateral damage.
Until now, the images created on computers have been based on "rasterization," the process of taking shapes and, with the help of complex algorithms and some serious number crunching, turning them into pixels or dots. Intel claims it has a new way of getting those pixels to work utilizing "ray tracing," which calculates the way a beam of light would bounce off an object and then turns that data into a 3-D image.
Ray tracing is cool stuff, of course. The first working model reportedly was developed at Stanford University, where they have plenty of processing power to play with. They need it, too. This is the kind of intensive computing that until recently could have caused a city block to go dark. But newness is everything in this field. In a technology futures speech in mid June, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said ray tracing is squarely in Intel's future.
That choice explains two puzzles. First, it accounts for why Intel hasn't bought Nvidia, despite lots of early speculation that rival AMD's purchase of ATI would trigger a similar move by Intel. Second, it explains what Intel is going to do with all those processor cores it has in its road map for future chips such as Larrabee, for which even software gurus still find it hard to write programs. In a demo at an Intel research briefing, a company spokesman said ray tracing is the perfect program to handle with parallel computing. That means it can scale across hundreds or even thousands of cores--a resource that most applications will never be able to effectively utilize.
According to Rattner, Intel's "aggressive multicore" approach outperforms a graphics processor when the cores use ray tracing instead of rasterization. Graphics processors, Rattner asserted, are "fundamentally tied" to the raster architecture.
Exactly what that means is open for interpretation.
Raja Koduri, the chief technology officer for AMD's graphics business, believes a graphics processor better handles ray tracing than a general-purpose multicore processor because it can be tuned to the application. There are multicore graphics processors, after all, that can be used for ray tracing, juiced with the kind of accelerator technology used inside graphics subsystems.
Koduri contends that ray tracing is just one tool in a toolbox, not the tool. We'll probably never know. Applications like 3-D modeling for gas exploration, engineering, motion picture animation and even some financial models are all likely candidates for this kind of technology. And some of it will probably even end up in future generations of handheld devices, including global positioning systems and advanced telephones.
But what's real, when it will happen and what kinds of chips will run it best are questions that consumers will decide.
Chief technologists have made bold predictions in the past. Some come true--but the track record is hardly picture perfect. |
