Intel's Larrabee Graphics Project Wins Microsoft Convert
Microsoft senior program manager
"Sometimes you run across an opportunity that is so big, so cool, that you just have to take it," Taylor writes on his blog.
Taylor will join Intel's Larrabee team, "helping deliver the Larrabee launch titles." The first discrete graphics products based on Larrabee are expected to arrive in 2009 or 2010, according to Intel.
Intel's first foray into the discrete graphics market in years is centered around the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant's attempt to build a graphics processor on the same x86 architecture used in the vast majority of central processors used to build PCs today. Nvidia, also headquartered in Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Devices, are the leading makers of discrete graphics and build their GPUs around OpenGL and DirectX programmability.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently dismissed Intel's Larrabee efforts at the graphics chip maker's inaugural NVISION conference in San Jose, Calif. Rex Tsang, head of sales and marketing at Hong Kong-based video card maker Sapphire, was similarly skeptical of Larrabee in a recent interview with ChannelWeb.
"Intel's Larrabee will be an interesting challenge, but it's going to be entry-level products. It's not going to be a threat to high-end cards," Tsang said. Sapphire is the leading maker of mainboards and video cards based on AMD's ATI graphics processors.
"Actually, Intel itself is probably the one who should be most scared of Larrabee, because it's going to be cannibalizing its own integrated graphics," Tsang added.
Taylor, though, seems convinced that Intel's onto something at least as big as the Flight Sim products he helped build at Microsoft.
"Indeed, Larrabee has the potential to not only change the face of PC graphics, but ultimately the shape of the PC architecture as well. This is something that, if I turned it down, I would be muttering into my coffee over for the next 10 years. So I have to go give it a go," he writes in his farewell blog post.