Larrabee Chip Delayed/Cancelled

The news for the day is that the current hardware version of Larrabee, Intel’s new graphics processor, for the consumer market has been delayed (or cancelled, depending on what you mean by “cancelled”). Intel is not commenting on possible future Larrabee hardware, so the Larrabee project itself exists. I don’t see an official press release (yet) from Intel. The few solid quotes I’ve seen (in CNET) is:

“Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project,” Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer said Friday. “As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product,” he said.

along with this:

Intel would not give a projected date for the Larrabee software development platform and is only saying “next year.”

The Washington Post gives this semi-quote:

Intel now plans its first Larrabee product to be used as a software development platform for both graphic and high performance computing, Knupffer said.

See more from The Inquirer, CNET, ZDNet, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Many more versions via Google News.

In my opinion, Intel has a tough row to hoe: catch up in the field of high-performance graphics, when all they’ve had before is the ~$2 chip low-end GMA series. This series probably has a larger market share in terms of units sold than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs combined (basically, any Intel computer without a GPU card has one), but I assume makes pennies per unit and by its nature is limited in a number of ways. Markets like high-performance computing, which make the most sense for Larrabee (since it appears to have the most flexibility vs. NVIDIA or AMD’s GPUs, e.g. it’s programmable in C++), is a tiny piece of the market compared to “I just want DirectX to run as fast as possible”. The people I know on the Larrabee team are highly competent, so I don’t think the problem was there. I’d love to learn what hurdles were encountered in the areas of design, management, algorithms, resources, etc. Even all the architectural choices of Larrabee are not understood in their particulars (though we have some good guesses), since it’s unreleased. Sadly, we’re unlikely to know most of the story; writing “The Soul of An Unreleased Machine” is not an inspiring tale, though perhaps a fascinating one.

Real-time Mandelbulb visualization with GigaVoxels

See this post on Cyril Crassin’s blog (I just saw it linked on Tim Farrar’s blog and had to mention it here since it is wicked awesome and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss it).

Cyril is the primary inventor of the Gigavoxels technique which has been the subject of several recent publications.  The Mandelbulb is similar to the Mandelbrot set, but in 3D.  Cyril evaluates the Mandelbulb on the fly to fill the brick cache used by the Gigavoxels.

Mandelbulb + Gigavoxels = real-time Mandelbulb visualization = pure win.

Rendering-related papers of the past 350 years

The Royal Society (full name: Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) is marking the start of its 350th year by putting pdf versions of 60 notable papers from its journal, Philosophical Transactions (founded in 1665) on the web.  Although all the selected papers are crucial to the history of science, I wanted to call out those particularly related to the fundamentals of rendering.

Almost all of Ke-Sen’s pages now up

Ke-Sen Huang has put up almost all the remaining pages that were taken down, after revising them according to ACM’s requirements:

The only pages not up yet are those for ACM’s Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling (SPM) for the years 2005-2008.

More of Ke-Sen’s pages are back up (+ a new one)

Following the reinstatement of the SIGGRAPH 2009 page a few days ago, the following paper pages have been modified to the new ACM guidelines and are now back up:

This is a little less than half the pages that were taken down.

All this and Ke-Sen has also started to collect the Eurographics 2010 papers as well – the man’s a machine!

Things I learned from the ACM

Well, not just from the ACM, but also from people involved in the Ke-Sen Huang and ACM Publications situation.

  • ACM SIGGRAPH membership also gives you access to just about all computer graphics papers in the ACM Digital Library. This I knew already, but found that others haven’t realized it. Any conference sponsored by SIGGRAPH is available, from what I can tell, e.g. I3D. I noticed a few weeks ago that the SIGGRAPH 2009  Posters were not accessible to me through this benefit; the ACM fixed this problem when I reported it.
  • Deep linking, where one site links directly to content on another site, is not illegal. The EFF notes that deep linking has not yet been found to be illegal by the courts. However, linking to sites providing infringing (illegal) copies of a work for download is contributory infringement.
  • “Sweat of the brow” compilations, such as the white pages of phone books, are not copyright. There is no original expression involved, so the Supreme Court ruled such are not protected. Paula Samuelson’s article in the Communications of the ACM (Google Scholar hits here) is a fascinating overview. Titles are not copyright. Elements such as the order in a Table of Contents are in a gray area, from what I can see. The ordering and grouping of the articles into sessions may be copyright protected – the courts have not ruled, as far as I know. Changing that order on an external web page would then not be copyright, since it would be a different “original” expression. Alphabetized or numerical ordering is not copyright protected.
  • You do not need to enforce your copyright to maintain it, unlike a trademark. You can ignore an infringement and not lose your rights. So the argument that a copyright must be protected now in order to preserve it in the future is incorrect.

Ke-Sen Huang’s paper pages are down, will soon go back up

We have mentioned Ke-Sen Huang’s awesome paper preprint link pages in many previous posts – they’re the best graphics resource on the web by a long shot.

Early last week, many people (including myself) were shocked to see most of the pages replaced by the following:

REMOVED – This page has been removed at the request of the ACM Publications Board

This resulted in an outpouring of anger as well as support for Ke-Sen.  Many people in the community contacted the ACM Publications Board to try to convince them to change their position.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending.  Today, Ke-Sen received the following email:

Dear Ke-Sen,

As you are aware, the computer graphics community has expressed dismay and concern about the removal of your web pages. ACM wants to make it possible for you to continue this service that the community clearly values very highly. By this message ACM grants permission for you to repost the pages, with the addition of links to the authoritative versions of the papers in the ACM Digital Library. The author’s home page links may also be included, but should not be links directly to the author’s version of the paper. Please post on the site that the information is being provided with the permission of the ACM. This is the solution you proposed earlier, and it is clear from the community’s comments that it is the right thing to do.

As you know, the concern about your pages was ACM copyright policy with regard to links. As a result of the community discussion, ACM will institute a formal review of this portion of its copyright policy.

Please contact us with any concerns or questions.

Sincerely,

Patricia Ryan
ACM Chief Operating Officer

ACM also offered to help with the work of adding the Digital Library links.  So nothing will be removed from Ke-Sen’s pages, and additional useful links will be added.

It will take a little while until the pages are back up, but they will be better than ever.  In the meantime, you can go to the Way Back Machine and find his pages from 2007 and earlier.

The graphics community has engaged with the ACM in a much more active manner than usual, which is a good thing.  We need to remember that it is our organization, and it is only as good as we make it.  So consider volunteering for conferences, paying more attention to ACM elections, etc. – I know I will.