IDF 2010 - Ray Tracing with 80 threads

Nicole Scott of Netbook News is on the ground for us at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco and she has a few nuggets of great video coverage for us to share with you all.

Next up we get a demonstration of the raw power of the Xeon platform in the form of four Intel Westmere EX processors. Each CPU has 10 cores per chip with Hyper-Threading enabled giving us an insane total of 80 processing threads to work with on a single system. If you don't know, that is an insane amount of processing power. What do you do with all that power? You show off some amazing fully CPU-powered ray tracing in the form of a program called KeyShot by the folks over at Luxion.

We get a look at KeyShot which is real-time racing tracing software that only uses the CPU to do its work. What is displayed it the production of photo realistic images. And when we say that, we mean it. The chap from Luxion adjusted settings such as the index of refraction (Ior) of glass on a chess piece and it impacted its immediate vicinity according. There are a couple other neat demos in the video below, too.



Pretty amazing, huh?