Real-time RaytracingCourtesy Intel

At the Inventor media summit last week in Paris, Autodesk showed near-realtime raytracing on an 8-core CPU. I guestimated it was running at about one frame per second. (30fps is the goal.)

Now a report in The Inquirer indicates that Intel figures its 8-core CPUs will replace GPUs. (Graphics processing units are the dedicated CPUs that run on graphics cards.) The company got the Quake IV game doing realtime raytracing on an 8 CPU computer.

The Inquirer figures ATi and nVidia have 2-4 years left in their business.

Comments

[Tony]

I'm skeptical - Intel has been on this "put everything into our CPU" march for a long time. Frankly, ATI & nVidia are (and have a lot more room to be, since they don't need x86 binary compatibility) more innovative.

Currently, the GPU's are much more parallel than the CPU, and are gaining more CPU characteristics. I think graphics will continue to suck up all available processing power for the forseeable future.

For an example of GPU's displacing CPUs, look here http://vsd.pennnet.com/display_article/306630/19/ARTCL/none/none/Graphics-architectures-speed-processing/.