Today's Intel quad-core CPUs can perform quite well with this technology and with Intel confirming that Nehalem processors will have up to eight cores on a single die (and that falls in the two year time span), it's possible that we'll be running raytraced games on hardware that we were shown this week at IDF. If it's not the Nehalem or the next iteration of standard processors, then how about the much-famed Terascale processor from another of Intel's development research teams? These 80-core 2 TeraFlop processors are being shown again at IDF and we'll have more information on them very soon as well.

According to Daniel and the Intel team, the magic number of rays they'll need to process each second to achieve that "game quality" and frame rate is around one billion (though interesting designs can be done with considerably fewer). That would allow for about 30 rays per pixel to be processed for each frame, with different rays necessary colors, lighting and other special effects. Doing that math, at a 1024x768 resolution for a total of 786,432 pixels times 30 rays per pixel and 60 frames per second, you get 1.415 billion rays per second required. That is an impressive amount of processing horsepower and a level that we just are not yet at. The dual Clovertown system running our live demo was pushing approximately 83 million rays per second plus the work of standard trilinear filtering.