Solid information about Intel’s new Larrabee architecture came out a few days ago, the Level of Detail blog has a good set of links. The major news is that Intel’s SIGGRAPH paper is now available for download from ACM’s Digital Library. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to this site’s resources (it costs money to subscribe). My contribution to the cause:

http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/UserFiles/en-us/File/larrabee_manycore.pdf

Thanks to Tom Forsyth for the link.

I’m excited by Larrabee not because of any particular technical feature (though I’m entirely savoring the paper itself, reading two pages a day at lunch), but rather by the fact that it opens up a whole new ecosystem for implementing graphics algorithms. Regardless of whether Larrabee wins or loses in the long-run, it will have a huge effect in increasing our knowledge by helping us explore different hardware and software designs for rendering.