Intel fakes Ivy Bridge graphics on stage at CES | Hacker News Reader

Intel fakes Ivy Bridge graphics on stage at CES

semiaccurate.com

Watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGrPyMKA_k

That wasn't a fake demo. That was a presentation which included a video where the presenter was joking around like it was live for about 10 seconds. No one in the audience was deceived, you can hear they got a good-natured chuckle out of it.

SemiAccurate is flatly misrepresenting this IMHO.

He said that "they are running it from backstage", which doesn't seem to be true. It seems to be a video running on the machine on stage (hence the VLC controls).

Given the rumors that Intel is delaying IvyBridge, it is very possible that they recorded this on a different machine, with a different GPU, and are claiming otherwise. They're not the first, nor the last to do this.

His words are a little hard to understand but he says: "because I am running it from backstage [audience laughter]". This takes it out of the "live demo" category in my mind.

"It's still a DX11 and I wanted all of you to see it because people were critizing us, when are you going to implement" ... OK that sort of sounds like he's claiming that DX11 is part of the product.

"We are delivering it with Ivy Bridge" This is a pretty clear claim about a product... but it's obviously not a shipping product yet.

It should have been clear to everyone in the audience that he was not really demoing the game on stage but that DX11 support is a promised feature of the upcoming Ivy Bridge product.

I think the joke is on intel after delivering multiple generations of products with non working linux graphics drivers. This would be akin to Nvidia cracking jokes about thermal solutions.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't yet seen an Intel graphics chipset that I would voluntarily choose again, particularly since I am a heavy user of OpenGL on Linux.

But I still don't think this guy's presentation counts as a fake demo.

And who knows? Maybe someday Intel will deliver a solid product for my purposes.

I think he stopped trying to pretend that it was a live demo precisely because he noticed that the fraud had been revealed due to the presence of the VLC menu, and a general lack of sync due to the delay the VLC mistake caused. It is not honest to try to fake a demo and then say "haha, it's fake really" after the audience has already seen through it.

To know how honest he intended to be, we need to know whether he would have convincingly faked it had the mistake not happened.

That's hard to say what was going on in his mind.

My gut feeling is that what might have happened is that he and his staff wrote the talk in advance and prepared for it in the hope that they could do a live DX11 demo. When it turned out to be not quite ready to demo in time, they prepared a video for the backup plan (not a bad idea anyway) and made light of it.

I would really be surprised if he went on stage thinking that he was going to pretend to play the game and actually fool the gamers who would undoubtedly be analyzing his video frame-by-frame. He could not have faked driving the race car convincingly without a lot of practice (or a self-turning wheel) and surely there would be at least one smart game/video developer involved in the preparation who would have told him that.

But I could be wrong. Dumber things have been done in the heat of the moment.

(FWIW I have given talks with very touchy complex actual live demos. But more often than not though it's been the little video clip that screws up in the presentation :-)

I don't find it surprising; I guess because he didn't actually admit to it being a video at any point during the talk. His excuse was that "they're running (playing) it backstage", which sounds hastily constructed, and would be a believable lie only if we hadn't seen the VLC dialog.

Anandtech confirmed that a similar machine can run the game though

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5359/intel-confirms-working-dx...

Funniest Intel fake I ever saw this: Intel had a demo booth at at computer covention where they ... ta da ... were demonstrating the latest whatever. I peered inside the computers and had a good chuckle. This was obviously run by the marketing guys on the cheap because the "intel inside" ... was actually and AMD chip.

A long, long time ago, Compaq was demoing some gigantic new server which had redundant, hot swappable everything. As the presenter mentioned that you could simply pull out a DIMM on the fly, my friend reached in and did so, which powered off the machine completely.

Probably the most stressful job in the world is giving high-profile tech demo's...

Funny anecdote, but does "hot swap" necessarily mean "yank out without warning"? My understanding is that you might need to tell the kernel that you are going to yank out a component before doing so. Similarly after adding in a component you might have to poke the kernel and say "hey, new stuff here" before you can use it.

Well he said it was "redundant everything".

Still, I suspect it was probably designed to handle unexpected 1-bit errors and, like you're saying, allow for replacing RAM modules with the cooperation of the OS.

Regardless of whether or not Intel's hardware can run a DX11 game well, doesn't it seem to be in bad taste to pretend to be playing a game when in reality you are at best streaming from backstage and at worst playing back a precanned recording? I feel like it is as if I downloaded a tech demo from graphics engine people and it ended up being an EXE wrapping a movie. Sure it might look pretty, but is that what people are expecting to see?

This is standard fare on trade shows. It is probably done, one hopes, not as much to outright mislead as to avoid embarrassing malfunctions on the show floor.

Not just a 'trade show' - in front of analysts, doesn't this constitute fraud? Particularly if (believed as of this post) Intel has not actually demonstrated the hardware performs as the hoax demonstrated?

How is this fraud? These are essentially live commercials. They can do whatever they want.

I'd wager half the products at CES are running canned demos in flash. It's an open secret and everyone does it.

I thought this was an analyst meeting, not a regular CES floorshow demo.

in a commercial you need to say "screen images simulated" to cover your legal ass.

It is mostly done (at least in this case, probably most cases) because it doesn't actually work and they aren't finished yet.

I think it is in good faith - they aren't intending to lie or deceive, but it's show and tell time and the product isn't ready. I still think it goes against the spirit of a tech demo and is pretty dishonest. Intel have very aggressive schedules lately, so this isn't surprising.

That is also why they knowingly ship broken chips lately:

http://www.techpowerup.com/156625/Intel-Core-i7-3960X-and-i7...

Yup. The whole industry runs something like two years ahead of current capabilities- that is to say, you start designing a product two years before it can be made- and the instant it actually works & has been tested, it is time to ship.

Didn't look like he was trying to fake anything at all. The VLC control bar was in plain view on a screen in front of everyone! Then he lets the audience in on the gag by letting go of the wheel while the video continues to roll.

SemiAccurate loves drama. Take everything you read on that site with a grain of salt. (Especially if it has to do with Nvidia. Charlie hates Nvidia.)

Sound advice.. then again: take everything you read online with a grain of salt :) And everything you read offline or hear on TV with a truckload of the same :)

Don't believe everything you've read on the Internet. -- Albert Einstein

Yay! They used VLC! \o/

Deactivating OSD and fullscreen controller is not really hard, it is on the main page of the simple preferences...

Anyhow, I don't think they pretended it was actually playing the game.

VLC has support for streaming video content and receiving it; I presumed that was how they were running it. Semi accurate sounds about right!

In case you haven't watched the video, this article completely misrepresents what actually happened. The author takes things a bit too literally, and lacks a sense of humor and sarcasm. It's pretty clear the presenter intended to reveal his brief deception and was only pretending to play.

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