Intel Acquires...Neoptica

[AmberClad]

Story here:

On October 19th, Neoptica was acquired by Intel in relation to the Larrabee project, but the news only broke on several websites in the last 2 days. We take a quick look at what Intel bought, and why, in this analysis piece.

Neoptica's Employees

* 8 employees (including the two co-founders) according to Neoptica's official website.
* 3 have a background with NVIDIA's Software Architecture group: Matt Pharr (editor of GPU Gems 2) and Craig Kolb who were also Exluna co-founders, and Geoff Berry. Tim Foley also worked there as an intern.
* 2 are ex-Electronic Arts employees: Jean-Luc Duprat (who also worked at Dreamworks Feature Animation) and Paul Lalonde.
* Nat Duca comes from Sony, where he led the development of the RSX tool suite and software development partnerships.
* Aaron Lefohn comes from Pixar, where he worked on GPU acceleration for rendering and interactive film preview.
* Pat Hanrahan also was on the technical advisory board. He used to work at Pixar, where he was the chief architect of the Renderman Interface protocol. His PhD students were also responsible for the creation of both Brook and CUDA.

I thought it was a pretty interesting story. The name Neoptica I hadn't even heard of before, but when I read the list of names involved, a light bulb immediately went off in my head.

Back when I was studying computer graphics at Virginia, the textbook we used ("Physically Based Rendering") was cowritten by our professor and Matt Pharr. Basically involved photorealistic raytracing technique using "hacks" based on physics principles.

Pat Hanrahan was one of our professor's mentors back in his Stanford days, if I recall. Nat Duca's name sounds vaguely familiar too.

 

[Denithor]

Intel gearing up to push on-chip graphics solution?