Gadget & Tech News

I have read several articles about NVIDIA CEO’s latest comments on Intel integrated graphics. that mostly interested public seeking the “drama du jour”, on a topic that is quite frankly not new: integrated graphics versus discrete graphics. I’ll limit the drama to the title, but I think that the questions and issues raised in that controversy are interesting and worth blogging about:

• Ron Foster from Intel argues that citizens “won’t need” discrete graphics cards in the future. 
• Pat Gelsinger from Intel said that the current graphics architecture, based on rasterization (like NVIDIA’s) is “no longer scalable and suitable for demands of the future”. Intel is working on a discrete graphics product based on “Larrabee”, the cipher name for a new multi-core architecture.

Here’s my take: whether you look at these two statements, you might ask yourself why Intel is building a “discrete graphics” product, whether citizens won’t need

it in the future. Secondly, I see no evidence as to why rasterization is no longer scalable.

The reason why graphics processing is extremely scalable is comprehensible to everyone:

The image that you see on your screen is made of pixels (2560×1600 pixels = 4 Million). Each pixel can be treated independently from its neighbor, making it a perfect candidate for parallel computing. We would love to have as many processors as we have pixels so that all the pixels can be processed simultaneously. In reality, the number of pixel processors has gone from 1 to 128 in the span of a decade, which is already extraordinary. It is obvious that that trend can continue for some date, so the reason why Intel thinks that rasterization isn’t sustainable is rather obscure.

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Original post by Allanda