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Intel To Integrate DirectX 11 In Ivy Bridge Chips
angry tapir writes "Intel will integrate DirectX 11 graphics technology in its next generation of laptop and desktop chips based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, a company executive revealed at CES. AMD has already implemented DirectX 11 in its Fusion low-power chips. Intel expects to start shipping Ivy Bridge chips with DirectX 11 support to PC makers late this year. Ivy Bridge will succeed the recently announced Core i3, i5, and i7 chips, which are based on Intel's Sandy Bridge microarchitecture."
does it still contain the DRM restrictions capability ?,
because Intel can forget all about CPU sales from us and from any of our customers until its removed
i dont care if it promises a free pony
contains DRM==No sale
period
Will Intel provide documentation so that other OSes will be able to make use of this feature ?
UPS Sucks
Goes to 11!
(I'm sorry)
I'd rather they made their integrated graphics fast than simply support new DirectX capabilities. I don't really see the point of supporting certain features if the whole thing is going to be slow. I suppose it's easier to implement something than it is to implement it well.
1. Will this in any way benefit OpenGL?
2. Will this hinder future versions of DirectX or are they backwards compatible in a way that there would be large chunks in hardware and new changes made as firmware revisions or software implementations?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The Sandy Bridge chips are the first in which Intel has combined a graphics processor and CPU on a single piece of silicon.
I thought Intel already did this a while ago with the newer Atom chips:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_atom#Second_generation_cores
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Those new texture mapping algorithms will really make outlook load fast.
Evil people are out to get you.
That's what I am worried about, I want my Minecraft landscapes to be rendered better.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Worse what happens when directX 12 comes along? is the hardware useless? can the hardware be upgraded?
1) The same thing that happens when you install DirectX 10 on a DX9 card: the DX9 subset of DX10 is hardware accelerated, the DX10 parts are run in software.
2) No. It's not useless. It will still accelerate everything it was accelerating before.
3) Probably not. But who cares? Either replace it, or live with a subset of current functionality.
What happens to your nvidia 580 card when dx 12 comes along? Exactly the same thing happens with these cpus. Either you live with the reduced functionality, or you put in a new video card, assuming your motherboard has a graphics card slot.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So why not do it generically? IBM Cell chips integrate a Vector chip on the CPU. Intel and AMD both have video chips integrated into the CPU. So why not integrate like the old Altvec of PPC a Vector co-processor.
Why not use a generic chip designed for that type of instruction set? That way your not limited software versions for your hardware.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So why not do it generically? IBM Cell chips integrate a Vector chip on the CPU. Intel and AMD both have video chips integrated into the CPU. So why not integrate like the old Altvec of PPC a Vector co-processor.
Why not use a generic chip designed for that type of instruction set? That way your not limited software versions for your hardware.
Because sufficiently generic hardware is not sufficiently fast at the desired task, graphics computation. Even with the optimization intel has put into this, they'll be MORE than an order of magnitude of graphics performance behind the dedicated solutions of their competitors.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You can find Sandy Bridge GPU benchmarks at http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/11
"Intel's HD Graphics 3000 makes today's $40-$50 discrete GPUs redundant. The problem there is we've never been happy with $40-$50 discrete GPUs for anything but HTPC use. What I really want to see from Ivy Bridge and beyond is the ability to compete with $70 GPUs. Give us that level of performance and then I'll be happy.
The HD Graphics 2000 is not as impressive. It's generally faster than what we had with Clarkdale, but it's not exactly moving the industry forward. Intel should just do away with the 6 EU version, or at least give more desktop SKUs the 3000 GPU. The lack of DX11 is acceptable for SNB consumers but it's—again—not moving the industry forward. I believe Intel does want to take graphics seriously, but I need to see more going forward."
Note: all Sandy Bridge laptop CPU have Intel HD Graphics 3000
Do you know some other way to do it? All graphics cards incorporate "hard-wired DirectX". If you are going to have graphics accelerators, they have to accelerate graphics. You can't meaningfully accelerate blits to frame buffers any faster than they already are. You have to accelerate higher level graphics abstractions. That's all DirectX is - an abstraction of higher level graphics operations. Any software, such as OpenGL, can (and does) tap into the more well chosen of those abstractions.
Given that DX is driving innovation in graphics cards at the moment and that GL is playing catch-up, the answer has to be "yes".
gtx 400 isn't integrated onto a cpu, which I think was the point.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Nvidia is making ARM CPUs.
The next version of Windows will run on ARM.
So, yes.
And if you're a Linux zealot, you can compile your kernel for whatever target hardware you want.
Why? What RISC architecture provides the same price/power/performance ratio that x86 provides?
POWER is fast and has an excellent power/performance, but entry-level systems cost ~$3500 after discounts.
Itanium is fast, but expensive and power-hungry.
MIPS is fast and power-efficient, but none of the players in the high-performance MIPS market have any interest in anything but network processors.
SPARC gives you two options - SPARC64 (slow, expensive, power-inefficient) and SPARC T-series (fast, but only for throughput-driven workloads; expensive; fairly power-hungry)
ARM has good power and price characteristics, but is slow compared to any production x86 chip except the Atoms and ULV stuff.
Basically, I'm not seeing a credible alternative to x86 for the market that it thrives in. If you want to pay up and get a nice fast RISC system, they're out there; alternatively, if you want a somewhat slower one for cheap, ARM is always available.
I'd say it is definitely Intel's fault if they load the chip with DRM BS that can only be used by signing NDAs and agreeing not to share your work, which from the looks of the Bridge chips really wouldn't surprise me. You know, I may not be a Linux guy but I actually do feel kinda sorry for them right now, as it looks like they are gonna get a butt raping that made the GMA 500 look Linux friendly.i mean it was bad enough when there are chunks of the video chip they can't get thanks to HDMI, thus giving them the choice of shitty binary blobs or crippled drivers, but now Intel is gonna pile the DRM into the CPU itself so basically their whole CPU will be crippled!
Frankly the future ain't looking good for Linux outside of embedded devices ATM. Both AMD with Bobcat/Bulldozer and Intel with Sandy/Ivy Bridge are moving more of the GPU into the CPU, and since I'm sure DX11 hooks into the HDMI support Linux guys will be looking at shitty locked down drivers or crippled drivers, their choice. All it will take is for Intel to add a couple of levels of "next gen" DRM and AMD to play along for the CPU to run like an old P3 unless you sign an NDA and agree to play ball, which by the very nature of Linux is impossible. You know as much as I hate to agree with RMS on...well pretty much anything at all, all this DRM into general purpose CPUs looks to me like one more step towards Stallman's right to read story becoming a reality.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It really depends on what you mean. If you mean strict RISC, it was too late the day the term was coined. If, OTOH, you mean a nearly orthogonal architecture that is general purpose (plus the ability to call on specialized functions from attached processor chips), that seem, to me, a real possibility.
Before you jump, though, you must decide on what is the longest word size your computer will address and what is the smallest unit it will address. The larger (and the smaller) you go, the harder the task will be. If all you need is bytes and 64 bit words, then it's quite doable with current technology. (Actually, this is as of a decade ago.) If you want bit level addressability and 128 bit words...you're probably on the cutting edge of possibility right now. (Note that I didn't say practicality.)
The think is, an almost orthogonal architecture expands its requirements tremendously as you increase the dynamic range of operations. If you only operate on bits and bytes, it's nearly trivial. (8-bit computers). When the longest word is a double byte, each opcode needs to come in three variants. If you do bits, bytes, double-bytes, and quad-bytes, then each must come in four variants. Four variants can be specified in two bits. Now if you want to have 64 commands in four variants, that's one byte for the opcode. Then each but none of those include specification for the addresses on which it is operating. For economy we define the lower 4K bytes of address space to be the registers. And we make all addresses the same length. but how long? Well, we've got 64 instructions, we could divide it in half and have 32 that address different lengths of addresses. Or we could break symmetry, and have, say, 8 that address a 64 bit address space, 8 that address a 24 bit address space, and 48 that address the 4K registers. (Note that the registers vary in size depending on which instruction mode is addressing them.)
So it could (easily?) be done. Whether something that strict is desirable is a different matter.
OTOH, I do agree that the current processors are overly complex.
P.S.: The precise allotment I used wouldn't be a good approach. I didn't bother to figure things out carefully at all, but just laid it out on the fly. E.g., Why 48 operations on the registers? Just because I had that many bits available. I didn't bother to figure out what they would be.
OTOH, and interesting approach might be to implement, say, Parrot in hardware. (That's a feasible target and fairly well specified already.) But I'm not sure that it's what you mean by RISC.
(P.S.: I'm talking well out of my field here, if it wasn't obvious.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Linux will receive support directly from Intel for Ivy Bridge, with better timing than for Sandy Bridge (whose support for Linux was notably very late): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODk3Nw
These days each version of directx specifies a set of required features. A "DirectX 11 card" means a card that implements all the features required by DirectX 11. In this context it's perfectly reasonble to ask whether those features will be exposed to other operating systems.
this is a kind of a interesting line of thought to follow. One would suppose that the DX11 chip will be proprietary hardware acceleration that will integrate with the API. Now, because this is being baked into chips by Intel, they will have to provide documentation for anyone who wants to write drivers for this. If they don't provide documentation and/or to anybody but MS, I would think that they will probably run afoul of monopoly or racketeering laws. IANAL, but I don't think you can get away with that that sort of thing. In any event, the hardware can/will be reverse engineered and direct x will become a multi-platform feature. I don't really see this as a band thing, because while OGL is pretty awesome, a little competition is healthy for everybody. Here is hoping that this 'opens up' DX a little more and spurs more innovation all around.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The GPU on sandy bridge consumes die area approximately equivalent to two CPU cores.
Unified memory architecture is an elegant thing, but it does require storing the framebuffer in main memory. At 1920x1080 with 32-bit color, the framebuffer is close to 64MiB. This will typically be refreshed at 60Hz, requiring 3.7GiB/s of memory bandwidth. That is quite a lot of bandwidth to be consuming 100% of the time. Incidentally, I recall that on my old SGI O2 R10k, it surprised me to find that algorithms touching only the CPU and memory ran a third slower at maximum resolution vs at 800x600. This was not a happy discovery given that the machine cost $19,995 and was meant to excel at graphics.
I realize that Intel GMA is not meant to excel at anything at all save for ripping some additional cash from my hand, but there's no need to integrate brain damaged graphics or wireless to achieve this. I would gladly pay for additional L3 cache or another CPU core or two.
Actually it is obvious you haven't used Windows in awhile, because thanks to unified driver arch they "just work" and have for quite awhile now, as long as you stay away from the bleeding edge beta stuff. And show me where exactly is Linux doing good in desktops? Can I pick up a Linux desktop in Walmart? Best Buy? Nope, hell they don't even sell Linux on netbooks anymore.
And if you think "growing by leaps and bounds" is a piddly 1% of the desktop, less than 30% of the servers and falling last I checked, and on smartphones that have been TiVo'd? Well then it doesn't matter what I say, because you are so far beyond drinking the koolaid you are actually mainlining the flavor crystals. the ONLY place Linux is getting any real "gains" is Android, which has about as much to do with a real Linux distro as my router does with Windows XP. One is a stripped down embedded device with major fragmentation, very little GPL compliance, and notice Android is STRICTLY based on GPL V2 code, aka "welcome to TiVo!", whereas the other is a full OS. Linux on the desktop? Practically DOA, the numbers have been pretty flat for quite awhile now. Linux on the server? As I said last numbers I saw had it falling and had it fourth behind Windows, various Unix, and IBM mainframe OS (sorry I can't remember the exact number name for that one) so I honestly don't see these "great leaps and bounds" but I'm sure you can provide citation for something other than Droid, yes?
And isn't it funny how if you say to a FOSSie anything other than "Gee, isn't Linux swell? It sure is Biff, and RMS smells like cotton candy!" they instantly start throwing words like troll and shill around? But I guess that is what I get for actually feeling sorry for someone whose philosophy is about to get them train fucked. Meanwhile I have this wonderful little driver tool I just update once a month or so on my flash and ALL hardware from pretty much the last ten years or so "just works" on every Windows for the past decade. Just put in the flash and hit run. And the graphic drivers in particular run just beautifully, time after time after time. So I really am sorry you're about to get fucked thanks to on chip protected path, but since MSFT signed the NDA we Windows users just don't have to worry about such things.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.