Yorkfield is a Ray-Trace monsterGC 007 45 nanometre Penryn showing some impressive performanceBy Theo Valich in Leipzig: Wednesday 22 August 2007, 13:56CHIPZILLA SHOWED A DEMONSTRATION of Ray-Tracer on its latest processors, and we have to say that the demo was quite a surprise to us.Who knows, maybe in a year CPUs might be good for graphics again.The reason for this is because of the advances made by the RT group inside Intel. Daniel Pohl, author of Quake III and IV Ray-Trace demonstrations held a presentation that showed that Ray-Trace came from 4FPS in 640x480 resolution on a 50 Xeon CPUs machine to over 90 FPS (frames per second) in 768x768 on a single machine with Yorkfield processor running at sub-3GHz clockspeed.We all know that oldXeon was a Netbust, but this difference is just insane.The demo machine was based on a Gigabyte's X38 motherboard, two AMD Radeon HD 2900XT cards in CrossFire mode, Corsair memory, and Intel 45nm quad-core processor, known to most people as Yorkfield. However, graphics part was not used at all, so you could have GeForce 8400 or Radeon HD 2400, this render would work as fast.This does not stop here, since the upcoming "Skulltrail" system will feature two Yorkfield processors with regular memory, making V8 rev2 a very powerful and more affordable system. Judging from what we saw in the morning, 8-core dual-Yorkfield system should be able to run the fascinating demonstrations in 1280x720. This would be a first for HD resolution with no major issues (or actually 1280x1280), but we will have to wait until Q4 to see that one.Bear in mind that this demonstration did not include some of the special effects used in world of RT, because support for SSE4 is still not implemented. Scaling is at nearly 100%, so with every extra core you will get around 99% scaling boost, or a near-perfect code.The lads in RT development plan to enable Intel's Ray Tracer available for gaming developers, so that Ray-Trace can become a reality. Timeframe for delivery is early 2009, and if you are great in logical games, we will leave you to calculate with what Intel product is planned to come in the same timeframe. µ
