Larrabee at GDC

I'm off to GDC this morning. This is my 16th one. I feel old. Still, I'm excited!

I'll post some thoughts if I get a few minutes between meetings & sessions this week, but wanted to quickly give a pointer to a couple sessions in which we'll be revealing a little more detail on our tech:

Mike Abrash is giving a session Friday morning called Rasterization on Larrabee: A First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions in Action. 

Shortly thereafter, Tom Forsyth is giving a follow up session called SIMD Programming with Larrabee: A Second Look at the Larrabee New Instructions in Action.

Be sure to check them out if you are in town for the conference.

Peek inside Larrabee

A Siggraph paper on the Larrabee architecture went live today, so there's press aplenty about the details we've given.

Still lots is hush hush, but those curious can read the paper here.

Shippin' stuff

Man, People are *shippin* stuff!

Dave's book is done. Congrats Dave. I remember finishing GPG5 and handing off the huge printed stack. Fun.

Robin (and a cast of others) shipped Boom Blox, and it's rockin' 85 on metacritic. I guess I'll finally have to buy that Wii.

Justin & Merci (who's game has been in beta for a while), shipped PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game.

Mary Jo shipped Iron Man. Congrats to her to, even though she's since left to do consulting. (BTW, the story's cuter coming from her S.O.)

Meanwhile, work on Industry's worst-kept secret will have me not shipping stuff for.... a while :-)

The New Gig

It's been a little while since I left Microsoft and I've yet to post something about the new gig. I actually started a while back, but wanted to wait until I got a good handle on what I can and can't say before doing the post. Now that I have a better idea in that department, I can say what's up.

The new gig is...

...the old gig!

Sort of, anyway.

I am once again employed by Intel. I am Director of Content Strategy for something called the Visual Computing Group. I can't specifically say what it is that we are building, other than to say that it goes by the codename of 'Larrabee', has to do with graphics and a lot more, and is very very cool. The Internets are tracking it a little bit, and you can get some vague details on Wikipedia.

A couple things I wanted to make sure I was specific about:

(1) My leaving Microsoft was in no way a result of any kind of fall-out with them. Some have hinted at such due to the tone of some of my posts, in which intonated some disagreement with some of the directions they are taking. That was true while I worked there as well. I also disagree with some of the things that Intel is doing. Doesn't mean you up and quit. Overall though, I think they are doing great things. I continue to be an enthusiastic Xbox360 customer. I cannot wait to play Braid, Poker Smash and N+, to name a couple upcoming highlights.

I was actually quite happy at MS, but got the idea of leaving when I started having conversations with a friend at a small startup company, who's product I was floored by. Around the same time, a bunch of people that I really trust and respect at Intel started having conversations with me, one thing led to another, and this turned out to be the best decision for me at this time.

(2) I intend to keep blogging, but expect the mix of topics to shift off of casual a little and onto big-budget titles, and more technology focused stuff to drift back in as I exercise my atrophied tech muscles (which were never hulkish to begin with).

That's all for now folks. We now return you to regularly scheduled programming.