A promise, in the year of election

Intel's spinners have gone out of their way to publish a whitepaper dealing with Larrabee physics performance.

Intel claims game physics are the backbone of any "modern game engine which employs the laws of physics to simulate life-like movement and interaction between objects, such as rigid and deformable bodies, cloth, and water."

The whitepaper goes on to state that "Game physics applications are very compute and memory intensive." Intel says "an array of multiple IA Intel processor cores, each augmented with a 16-wide vector processor unit" can deal with the task at hand.

The whitepaper addresses some aspects of rigid body simulation, rigid bodies, fluids, cloth, collision detection and many other techniques. It then goes on to discuss potential advantages of an multicore Larrabee approach to programming physics, including a thread-level physics kernel and SIMD-level parallelism, and SIMD hardware support. Anyway, Intel describes Larrabee as a "many-core multi-threaded architecture with a 16-wide vector processor unit" with high computational ability and bandwidth that can meet the demands of game physics applications. Yes, it all looks great. On paper.

On another note, research whitepapers are not really something you should take too seriously. Most of them involve a bunch of boffins saying good things about ideas made up by higher echelons, or should we say the powers that be, cautiously scrutinized by spinners in charge of the whole endeavor.

For example, take the British 1957 Defence whitepaper that said manned fighter aircraft were obsolete, or the 1939 whitepaper that promised Israelis and Palestinians a peaceful coexistence in what's still a war zone. Nice to see those ideas worked out just fine 50-70 years on.

Anyway, you can get a glimpse of Intel's whitepaper here.