decent gpu from intel?

That would be a first...

Larabee may look interesting on paper and indeed, nvidia sticking their nose right into HPC business may prod intel to actually do something about their laughable gpu line, but I won't believe it 'till I see it.

The crapware most of today's notebooks on the reference platform run on is a prime example of intel's utter incompetence when it comes to gpus. Hail the day when an intel graphics chip gives a 2 year old midrange Nvidia at least a decent competition.

@AC: hybrid computing so far seems to be a cheap way of getting around the silicon limitations we are facing today. FPGAs are still out there, but GPUs are now ready and acessible to a very large audience. There is also an advantage of pressing multicore processing education onto developers, who were frustrated with lack of single-core processing power.

AFAIK, GPUs won't save the world either, but hybrid computing seems an interesting and effective alternative for specific tasks, right until someone comes up with anything better.

@AC 14:18

All of the technologies you mentioned have actually had success...that doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvement.

And GPUs solve the one major _hardware_ issue that FPGAs coudn't - they ride on the CONSUMER driven cost/performance curve, as their hardware is funded by the investment in graphics cards, which are hugely important in the mainstream PC world and hugely profitable. As such, they have a chance economically that other technologies can't quite match. Now it is down to the software, and nVidia has done a heck of a job pushing CUDA, with packaged training, CBT, white papers, consultancies, etc. being thrown at the developer community. C and Fortran drivers are really the icing on the cake. It will turn out to be a very interesting year for hybrids - in the next 24 months we will know if they have succeeded or failed.

@AC

Though the IT world is probably one of the worst at hyping a technology for a sustained period that nobody subsequently cares about, I think shifting functionality to the GPU is a real trend since they are exceedingly good at the sort of media tasks consumers care about, most machines have one already and the industry is making steps towards commoditising the relevant programming interfaces.

Obviously not so relevant on the desktop, but look at Apple: they've authored OpenCL and given it to Kronos, while being the dominant player in the sort of media devices that would really benefit from this type of technology. Though Apple don't actually seem to be fans of NVidia, so maybe that's not relevant to this particular fluff piece.

Lashes for the author!

Wrong sort of cat.