Gelsinger believes that the industry needs a programmable, ubiquitous and unified architecture... like Larrabee. This is of course convenient, but he seems to forget that we've had very programmable and unified architectures ever since the launch of the GeForce 8800 GTX in November 2006.
DirectX 10 was an inflection point for graphics cards, because it is the first time that shader units have become fully generalised processing 'cores'. Although it's worth remembering that they're not quite as flexible as a CPU core in their current design.
"Here's somebody who's new to our industry and he's basically telling us that 3D graphics as we know it is dead," said Huang. "This is the most inspirational quote I can imagine giving to our employees. Nothing fires us up more than that. I'm sure that's what he intended -- getting the most intensively competitive company in technology fired up. We're pretty fired up anyway, as we're pretty passionate about what we do. The fact that the statement is just plain wrong means it's pointless to argue about it."
It could be said that even Andrew Chien, Intel's Director of Research, agrees to an extent with Huang's assessment of Gelsinger's sensational statement, although to say that he agrees completely would be a bit of a stretch. Chien believes that ray tracing will not make an immediate transition into graphics engines -- instead, it'll gradually be introduced for certain effects. "We expect [ray tracing] to first penetrate areas where the additional flexibility is of benefit to developers. If the image quality benefits are there, but performance isn't acceptable, developers aren't going to use it," he said during an interview at IDF Shanghai.