Larabee and more

I predicted in a previous post that Larabee would be another Intel flop:

Having a look at Larabee, it seems immediately clear to me that it's just another Itanium (The wonderchip that wasn't).

Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The rumor started being floated a month or two ago that Larabee would be canceled, and now it has been confirmed: No more Larabee.. Why? Too hard to program, apparently. So instead of launching a doomed product, they canceled it. The news was hidden behind the news of a 48 core parallel processor being announced. Coincidence? Seems like the Larabee concept will live on, 100 copies of the former-GPU will still be produced for research purposes. It seems now that the Cell/Larabee way of dealing with graphics rendering problems is dead again, and nVidia should be in the clear for a while. This does raise some interesting questions about what the future of AMD/ATI's fusion will be..

Some other bits of news, GameDev has a great article on 2D 'spring' physics, and covers some intermediate concepts like the SAT. John Ratcliff finally made a Convex decomposition library from his excellent Convex decomposition code - something I've been meaning to do for about two years now.

Blackspawn made an interesting post about using SVG for debugging, his website has a number of gem's, including cellular textures and circular harmonics.
HPMC released a GPU-based isosurface renderer, and I'll end this post with some videos of the work: