Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Intel pronounces Larrabee dead, how will this affect Unreal Engine 4?

You might remember this interview with Epic Games' ever so humble president Mike Capps from a few weeks ago, in which he said "if you look at what’s happening in the PC market – Larrabee and all that – it’s really taking off, and I think the jump to next generation’s going to be another really big one". Sadly, in an unexpected turn of events, Intel decided otherwise and decided to kill off the GPU that was partly Tim Sweeney's baby. In numerous occasions (e.g. Siggraph '09) Sweeney has stated that Epic's next-gen game technology Unreal Engine 4 was built specifically with Larrabee's multi-core architecture in mind.

Hopefully, this devastating revelation from Intel will not hinder Unreal Engine 4's supremacy in the next console generation, because I dare not imagine what console graphics would have looked like if it wasn't for UE3's anti-alias free dominance... oh the Humanity!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Directors, CEOs, bosses and marketing guys usually have no f....ing idea about technical things. They only should speak about money.

Sam Lapere said...

Indeed. I still don't understand Capps' ignorance when it comes to Larrabee though.

AFAIK Larrabee will not be sold as a separate GPU, but it's successor (MIC/Knight's Corner) will live on as a computing card(Intel's version of Tesla, probably in a similar price range, which means it's not going to be affordable for the big public).

J said...

I don't know much about CPUs, but I think the tea leaves point to something big brewing in 2013?. Crytek's June 2010 presentation is on schedule with the GDC 09 notes of Intel.