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Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 12 September 2008. 17:44:00

There will be an answer, Larra-bee

INVESTMENT BANKING BOFFIN, Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Collins Stewart, reckons Intel’s upcoming Larrabee graphics chippery has an uphill battle ahead if it wants to play with the big graphics boys. Kumar reckons Intel is being either supremely daring or supremely hubristic in proclaiming its Larrabee will be able to outperform Nvidia’s best GPUs, noting, "Nvidia has had over 10 years to optimize the 3D graphics pipeline, the necessary drivers, the platform connections needed to supply the memory bandwidth required, and to work with the software and apps developers". But Kumar may simply be playing it cautious. After all, Chipzilla has a knack of dominating every other chip market it tries its hand at, so why not give standalone "discrete" graphics processors a go? The chip giant has already carved its name deep into the integrated graphics silicon market, but admittedly this doesn’t mean much when it comes to discrete graphics, which are highly complex chips, chock full of over a billion transistors and hundreds of stream processors....






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