Intel Inside and Out: Fall 2005 IDF - ' Enthusiast PC '
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Not surprisingly, Intel has taken a genuine interest in catering to the PC enthusiast crowd in recent years. Not only are these early adopters passionate about extracting the maximum performance from the "fastest, latest, and greatest" hardware, they're veritable computer experts (often working in IT themselves) whose opinions influence the purchasing decisions of colleagues and friends. The niche they occupy is quite small; they only account for the top 5% of total desktop purchases. But their influence as trendsetters has gotten Intel's attention and earned serious gamers a degree of respect in the industry as educated and empowered consumers.

During this session, ATI's Daniel Taranovsky shared some information about CrossFire, ATI's high-end dual-GPU solution. A characteristic feature that differentiates CrossFire from Nvidia's comparable SLI architecture is a separate chip referred to as the compositing engine. It's primarily used for blending results from individual GPU processing to render a scene. It lends the card flexibility, since other features such as math calculations (divides, gamma correction) can be integrated into the compositing engine as well. Continued...

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