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Intel is investing up to $12 million to create a new research center that will focus on developing new types of graphics and visual computing technology at a time when the entire PC industry is trying to create new types of graphics-intense applications.
Intel Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner announced the $12 million investment May 12. Intel plans to invest the money during the next five years to help build the Intel Visual Computing Institute, which is located at Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany.
The goal of the center is to develop new types of PC graphics and visual computing technology – both hardware and software – that will not only help in developing games but also help create other types of applications for fields such as health care and financial services.
While Intel’s announcement lacked specifics, the company noted it was particular interested in what it calls tera-scale research and technology. For Intel, this means using dozen and even hundreds of processing cores within a chip to improve the graphics and visual abilities of PCs.
In addition, this type of technology chip technology can create massive types of supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems that use multicore technology to solve problems in parallel instead of using older methods to simply crank up the clock speed of single-core processors.
“Given the growing importance of visual computing technology, it made perfect sense to expand our relationship and form this new institute,” Rattner wrote in a statement. “We are confident that it will become an internationally recognized center and a driver for European leadership in the visual computing field.”
If this approach to computing seems familiar, it’s because Intel and its two main rivals in this area – Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices – have been pushing this technology as an alternative to classic chip technology.
Later this year or in early 2010, Intel plans to finally unveil its Larrabee graphics processor, which will use multiple x86 cores and allow Intel and software developers to take advantage of new types of parallel computing.
Nvidia is also interested in this type of multicore approach and using parallel computing. In the last few years, Nvidia has pushed its own Tesla graphics processing units or GPUs for this type of computing. In addition, Nvidia has developed a programming language called CUDA, which works as a parallel computing engine for Nvidia’s GPUs. AMD, through its ATI graphics division, is at work on the same technology.
The Intel investment in this new facility in Germany, which the company says is now its largest investment ever in a Europe university, comes at a time when Intel is facing ongoing scrutiny concerning its business practices within the European Union. Later this week, the EU is expected to fine Intel millions, if not billions, of dollars, claiming the company unfairly used its position to push competition out of Europe’s PC market.
By the end of 2009, Intel is hoping to employ dozens of workers at the new facility, including its own researchers, as well as individuals from Saarland University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.
-----------------------------BY Scott Ferguson
Source：eWEEK
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