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Graphics Throwdown

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva

Graphics Throwdown

Graphics Throwdown
Q&A with tothehills 2 Director Fritz Donnelly
Digital Content Producer's The Briefing Room

Siggraph 2008 was to be about ATI's comeback. The long-struggling graphics-card maker was back with two potent new OpenGL offerings, while the top offering in its games division was being anointed as the fastest card ever by some reviewers. Nvidia kept in the game with realtime raytracing running entirely on a graphics card.

But that was before Sony turned up with the first mainstream product to incorporate next-generation Cell graphics-processor technology. Intel made an even bigger splash at the show with the first in-depth details of a project — codenamed Larrabee — that seeks nothing less than to dethrone longtime graphics leaders ATI and Nvidia.

Over much of the past decade, those two companies had come to dominate the personal-computer graphics market. ATI (a division of AMD since 2006) and Nvidia now own some 98 percent of the discrete GPU business, according to Jon Peddie Research. Peddie notes that the computer-graphics market has grown from $1 billion in its beginnings around 1980 to some $60 billion today; that's a remarkable growth rate of 16.5 percent for the past 27 years. Graphics could grow even faster over the next few years as new and upgraded gear demands it — from PCs, game devices, cell phones, digital photography, and home HD theaters. But until now, Intel had only a low-end integrated graphics chipset to offer.

Meanwhile, Nvidia and ATI are moving aggressively into non-graphics use of GPU hardware, building new-style supercomputers and further threatening another market for Intel.

One reason Intel and Sony can challenge longtime market leaders ATI and Nvidia? Fundamental changes in the design of CPUs and GPUs that are merging the two approaches. Both general computing chips and ones designated for graphics processing are transitioning from single-core designs that handle a limited set of applications to multiple-core designs that work with a wider number of apps. Today, both CPUs and GPUs sport multiple processing cores — which work on data in a parallel fashion, greatly speeding up processing time.

One of the first chips to use multiple cores to incorporate aspects of CPUs and GPU is the Cell processor. Jointly designed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, it powers the Sony PlayStation 3. The chip is featured in Sony's Zego BCU-100, a 1RU graphics renderer introduced at the show. Expected to ship by the end of the year with a tab of less than $10,000, the Linux-controlled Zego is spec'd for use in high-end graphics operations. Currently, that includes a rendering program from mental images and Side Effects Software's Houdini server tool. The Siggraph demo, which included realtime modeling and lighting, ran at 4K resolution.

However, while Zego employs the Cell processor, it also requires a separate RSX “Reality Synthesizer” GPU, a graphics chip codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3.

Intel's Larrabee effort, meanwhile, takes a leap beyond that to deliver an all-in-one solution: a fully programmable graphics chip that is also a many-core CPU. Each Larrabee core is based on Intel's legacy Pentium architecture with added up-to-date improvements such as multithreading and 64-bit support to improve per-core performance. It's these ×86 facets that differentiate it from the stream processors in modern GPUs by Nvidia and ATI.

Instead of dedicated silicon on a graphics chip to manipulate code, Larrabee is almost totally software-based — which greatly increases the flexibility and programmability of the architecture as compared to standard GPUs.

Nvidia has already challenged a number of Intel's claims. With the first products from the Larrabee project expected to deliver as early as 2009, the graphics fireworks have just begun.

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.