New kid on the block
One of the key things we were hoping to get from the recent Intel Developers Conference in Shanghai was more news on Intel’s discrete graphics offering – Larrabee – which is currently in development and expected to make an appearance next year.
While not much more info was volunteered, Pat Gelsinger – senior VP and GM of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel – did have some news for the channel.
At a roundtable discussion, Gelsinger (pictured top right) revealed that Intel would not sell Larrabee-based products directly, rather it would utilise the infrastructure of existing add-in board partners (AIBs), just as AMD and NVIDIA already do.
Clearly if Intel does this successfully, it will not only just threaten AMD and NVIDIA through direct competition, but could also weaken them by stealing board partners away too.
HEXUS.channel was keen to know what AMD, NVIDIA, AIBs and the channel thought about this announcement and NVIDIA newbie Ben Berraondo (pictured bottom right) was the first to step up to the plate.
Tech insiders will know Berraondo as the former UK PR man at Asus, a job made particularly eventful by the huge success of the Eee PC last year, no doubt.
Rather than rest on his laurels, however, a few weeks ago, he chose to move to the hardly sedate world of GPUs and is now NVIDIA’s PR manager for the UK and Northern Europe.
This is also, apparently, Berraondo’s first interview with an NVIDIA hat on, so we decided to go easy on him ;-) and start by asking him if Larrabee could be a fatal blow for NVIDIA.
‘In terms of importance, the equilibrium is shifting more towards the GPU,’ said Berraondo. ‘Intel has spent its history insisting that the CPU is the most important part of a PC. But with its Larrabee project it has effectively admitted that the GPU is just as, if not more, important.
‘Computing has become far more visual and processing is moving more towards parallel architecture,’ he continued. ‘GPUs are not just used for gaming and visual applications, they’re increasingly appearing in other applications like big, professional ones too.’
As an illustration of the growing importance of the GPU, Berraondo pointed out that Adobe has recently introduced GPU acceleration for Acrobat. He also said: ‘In terms of optimising the performance of a PC, we believe that money spent on a GPU brings about a more significant performance change than the same amount spent on a CPU.’