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I am skeptical of this, for two reasons. First, the GPGPU thing really hasn't affected Intel, who still sells more units than either AMD or nVidia, and will probably continue to have a stranglehold on their current markets. GPGPU really doesn't matter to most people.

Second, the guy that wrote this code, Chris Wilson, is one of the big guys behind Cairo and had an experiment, cairo-drm, where he plugged Cairo directly to an Intel graphics chipset by talking directly to the kernel and bypassing the Intel X drivers. His results were probably the foundation of this new work, as far as I can guess.




Intel has been trying to get into the GPGPU business for years. The problem for them, of course, is you have to have a credible GPU before you can GP with it. Here's where they tried to glue together a bunch of existing cores (yes P54C Pentiums) and call it a GPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%2... Like early experiments in aviation, it didn't fly.

I didn't know about Wilson. I'd somehow gotten the impression that this work had been supported by Intel. Oh well. If they didn't, they shoulda. :-)


Intel hired Chris a couple years ago, and he has been doing awesome things ever since. Like this SNA thing. :3




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