WARP10 and Larrabee

[iwod]

Funny no one has mention anything in here.

WARP10 is a new component that will be part of DirectX graphics technology in Windows 7. WARP10 is a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer. It is shipping in beta form in the November 2008 DirectX SDK. WARP stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform. This paper describes the following aspects of WARP10.

Isn't this exactly what Intel want?

 

[INKster]

Funny no one has mention anything in here.

WARP10 is a new component that will be part of DirectX graphics technology in Windows 7. WARP10 is a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer. It is shipping in beta form in the November 2008 DirectX SDK. WARP stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform. This paper describes the following aspects of WARP10.

Isn't this exactly what Intel want?

Old news...: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=50957

 

[Nick]

Isn't this exactly what Intel want?

Not likely. The MSDN article states that WARP is based on the reference rasterizer code (using dynamic compilers to speed things up). Nothing in the article suggests that they use a tile-based renderer as described in the Larrabee paper. WARP is designed for running on the CPU to save Microsoft from further graphics incompatibility disasters and allow developers to have an early peek at future Direct3D extensions.

Intel on the other hand needs a platform-independent renderer that supports multiple APIs. It is highly likely that WARP is closely tangled with the DX10+ architecture and Windows Vista+. Larrabee's thread scheduling happens on chip and is not going to rely on the Vista thread pool and scheduling kernel. Besides, from a business perspective Intel doesn't want to be dependent on Microsoft, and Microsoft doesn't win anything by doing Intel any special favors.

Last but not least, Intel bought Pixomatic a couple years ago (and hired Michael Abrash and other graphics gurus), and it modified its own auto-vectorizing compiler for native C/C++ Larrabee programming. So it already has all technology and knowledge in house to write a highly optimized software renderer tailored specifically for Larrabee.