Interview – Lots of graphics tech tradeshows are on the calendar for the coming weeks - Siggraph 2008 in Anaheim, IDF Fall in San Francisco, Games Convention in Leipzig and Nvision 08 in San Jose. Intel will play a big role in three of those shows and with Larrabee out and Nehalem almost ready for showtime, we felt it was time to get an update on Intel’s ray-tracing efforts.

Siggraph is just around the corner, so it should not be too surprising that Intel is talking more seriously about Larrabee, a discrete graphics product due for launch in “2009 or 2010”. Intel decided to provide a few more slices of information that are likely to fuel a new round of rumors on the Internet.  

Facebook and Intel have signed an infrastructure solution agreement, under which Intel Facebook will install “thousands of Intel Xeon processor-based servers over the next year.”

Intel is proud of its dominant position in semiconductor in production technology and especially the fact that, for as long as we can remember, has led the industry in terms of the smallest chip structures. Its 45 nm technology is still at least one year ahead of AMD. But it appears that Intel will have to give up that lead next year, at least for a few months, when GPUs will make their transition to 40 nm.

Whether you like it or not, cloud computing is shaping up more and more to become one of the key IT trends of the next decade. Today, cloud computing consists of too many unknown variables and most cloud services available could be considered transitional services at best. HP, Intel and Yahoo are now taking a lead role in this trend and are building a huge cloud computing playground for researchers in the hope that convincing applications will be developed and open questions will be answered.