Core i7-980X PC versus eight-core Xeon workstation

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Having been writing about photo-realistic 3D graphics rendering for issue 192 of the magazine, I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with the state of 3D graphics and looking into the absolute best techniques for achieving realistic lighting. And along the way I’ve got a new insight into the sheer speed of the latest CPUs.

Turns out the best 3D rendering algorithm is a hugely intensive method known as path tracing, which is sort of like ray tracing’s dad. The theory behind the method actually pre-dates ray tracing, but it’s only now that PCs are getting fast enough for experimental dabbling at home.

The good part is that, while it needs a heck of a lot of computing power to do, path tracing is actually a fairly simple technique to implement.

But where to get a path-tracing application to play with?

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All your computer are belong to us

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

To London’s Charlotte Street Hotel this morning, and the official UK launch event for Intel’s new Xeon 5500 series CPUs – the ones with that ever-so-fast Nehalem architecture in them. (No, it wasn’t a joke. Real things do happen on April 1st.)

It wasn’t the most surprising launch of a server processor ever, but server events aren’t usually renowned for thrills and spills.

Some interesting figures emerged though. They show in just two slides the market reality behind Sun being swallowed up by IBM a few weeks ago, and the sheer dominance of Intel when it comes to processors in everything from enterprise servers to netbooks. (more…)