Intel VCG Chief Architect identified; SDK being developed

Monday 19th February 2007, 12:12:00 PM, written by Geo

The graphics world has been atwitter in recent months over swirling rumors and indications of a re-entry by Intel into high-end graphics. Speculation has centered around the so-called "Larrabee group", which recently was identified on Intel's own pages as their "Visual Computing Group". Now, courtesy of a couple of seminar pages at major universities, VCG's "Chief Architect" has come to light. He's Douglas M. Carmean, and his Intel biography notes that he was a key architect of the Pentium 4 architecture. He's been travelling to universities giving a presentation called "Future CPU Architectures -- The Shift from Traditional Models". Intel's own page on the seminar as part of their lecture series shows Carmean's title as "Principal Architect with Intel's Desktop Products Group". However, recent seminars since Intel unveiled the "Visual Computing Group" identity are now calling him "Chief Architect in Intel's Visual Computing Group". The seminar description talks about "an architecture that employs more cores and more threads", and "speculate(s) on some potential next steps for that technology". Given it is under the VCG banner, this would seem to give a heavy indication of where that technology is going.

In other VCG-related developments, it appears that Intel has changed their public description of VCG's aims. Previous versions of the page specified the aim of developing "discrete graphics products"; the current version has been re-crafted to specify "advanced products" instead. Additionally, the page seems to have been revamped to include a much greater software focus than before. A new SDK for their product is being developed with the aim to no less than "ignite the industry", and experience in building new algorithms and shaders is sought. Ray tracing gets a specific mention, which is consistent with Intel's recent public statements that they see ray tracing as the future of computer graphics.

intel ±

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