Pohl is the German computer science student behind the ray-traced versions of Quake 3 and 4 that have been featured on Digg and Slashdot. For his masters' thesis, he built a version of Quake 4 that uses real-time ray tracing to achieve some pretty remarkable effects—shadows are correctly cast and rendered in real-time, water has the proper reflections, indirect lighting looks like it's supposed to, etc. He was later hired by Intel, and now he's working within their graphics unit on real-time ray tracing for games.

Weer... It may have 30 cores, but guess how many ALU's each core has - that's right 1, just like any other CPU. Considering the 2 TFLOP computational power assesment, it is likely a very powerful ALU, but it would still only amount to the same amount on a GPU, which puts the Larrabee at a huge disadvantage against identically-architectured GPU's, such as the G92. It would be a lot more powerful, naturally, but just as the 800 ALU's running under the "R700"' core, it will fail at performing gaming-specific operations ...

swaayePentium P54C is the Pentium 75-200 MHz

OnBoardOh I remember when a friend of mine had a Pentium 75MHz and he had it overclocked to 90MHz and NFS (1) run on full screen! I had something 486 (edit: probably 486SX 33MHz) back then and could only run it half screen big :) I was so in awe of the overclock and the performance, remember everyone was not doing it (OC) those days.

Average Power consumption of a TOP10 system is 1.32 Mwatt and average power efficiency is 248 Mflop/s/Watt

TheGuruStudSince when is a general purpose cpu going to be able to process graphics at a respectable rate?

If that was the case, everyone with a quad core would be getting 50 FPS in 3dmark with the cpu test (I don't care if it has high speed ram and cache attached or not). I'm calling intel retarded, again.

edit: Or it's more fud. Like that 10 GHz pentium 4 they just had laying around :laugh:

Error 404@ TheGuruStud: I went from a Pentium 90 to a Celeron-400! :p

Error 404Hey, would you be able to get a single one of the cores and then put it on a Pentium board? :D

Hopefully they'll get smart and use Pentium Pro cores instead; 512 kb of L2 cache, MMX arch., and cooler name; what could go wrong?

Also, imagine if you got a bunch of mobos with 4 PCI-E x16 lanes (I'm pretty sure they exist), stuck these cards onto a whole bunch of them (along with a quad core something), and ran a beowulf cluster? Say you had 8 motherboards, thats 4 cards per mobo, which is 32 cards, which is 64 TFLOPS!! :eek:

Larrabee Architecture for Visual Computing -- With plans for the first demonstrations later this year, the Larrabee architecture will be Intel's next step in evolving the visual computing platform. The Larrabee architecture includes a high-performance, wide SIMD vector processing unit (VPU) along with a new set of vector instructions including integer and floating point arithmetic, vector memory operations and conditional instructions. In addition, Larrabee includes a major new hardware coherent cache design enabling the many-core architecture. The architecture and instructions have been designed to deliver performance, energy efficiency and general purpose programmability to meet the demands of visual computing and other workloads that are inherently parallel in nature. Tools are critical to success and key Intel® Software Products will be enhanced to support the Larrabee architecture and enable unparalleled developer freedom. Industry APIs such as DirectX™ and OpenGL will be supported on Larrabee-based products.
Intel AVX: The next step in the Intel instruction set -- Gelsinger also discussed Intel AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) which, when used by software programmers, will increase performance in floating point, media, and processor intensive software. AVX can also increase energy efficiency, and is backwards compatible to existing Intel processors. Key features include wider vectors, increasing from 128 bit to 256 bit wide, resulting in up to 2x peak FLOPs output. Enhanced data rearrangement, resulting in allowing data to be pulled more efficiently, and three operand, non-destructive syntax for a range of benefits. Intel will make the detailed specification public in early April at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. The instructions will be implemented in the microarchitecture codenamed "Sandy Bridge" in the 2010 timeframe.

lemonadesodawww.intel.com/pressroom/archive/reference/IntelMulticore_factsheet.pdf

So, will Larrabe be adopting AVX?

jyoung752 TFLOPS by Larabee a year from now is nice, but I can get 2.4 TFLOPS from the Radeon 4870x2 a month from now. And the Radeon cards are already rumored to be ray tracing monsters (used for ray tracing HD scenes in Transformers) www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/.

eidairaman1Ok this gives AMD and Nvidia Time to Send in Working Pieces for Hybrid units.

substance90Woah, since when is Intel planning on entering the video card industry with something more powerful then built-in GPUs?! And what`s with the design?! You can`t just stich 32 Pentiums together and call it a GPU! nVidia and AMD are way ahead in graphics card design!

Mountain House (CA) - Earlier today we learned that Intel is already heavily pitching its Larrabee technology to partners, but the technology foundation largely remains a mystery. German publication heise.de now provides more clues with a rather interesting note that Larrabee is built on Intel en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation ’s nearly two decade-old P5 architecture.

According to Heise author Andreas Stiller, possibly the most prominent person to cover computer hardware in Germany, Intel dipped into the bin of obsolete technology (Intel’s phrase for replaced technology) to come up with a technology base for the Larrabee cGPU. While attending Intel’s 40th anniversary briefing (Intel will celebrate its 40th birthday on July 18), Stiller apparently found out that the Larrabee cores will be built on the P54C core — which was the code-name for the second-gen, 600 nm Pentium chip.

The first Pentium core (P5, 800 nm, 60 and 66 MHz) was in development since 1989 and was introduced in 1993. The P54C was launched in 1994 with speeds up to 120 MHz, while the succeeding 350 nm P54CS reached 200 MHz. The 55C core (280 nm up to 233 MHz) followed in 1995 and was replaced with the Pentium II in 1997.

Stiller added that Larrabee will debut with 32 cores that "are likely" to be equipped with MMX extensions, which would mean that Larrabee will actually be based on a modified, 45 nm P54CS core. The cores will also support 64-bit. If you count in the fact that the MMX part was replaced with a 512-bit wide AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) unit, Stiller comes up with a theoretical performance of 32 flop/sec. per clock, topping the 2 Tflop/sec. mark at a clock speed of 2 GHz.

If this is true, then Intel may be able to hit about twice the performance in single precision calculations as Nvidia and AMD achieve today. However, both Nvidia and AMD were able to double their floating point performance between 2007 and 2008 and we have reason to believe that once Larrabee will be available, GPUs may be hitting 3 to 4 Tflop/sec. in single GPU configurations. AMD’s dual-GPU ATI Radeon 4870 X2 (clocked at 778 MHz) is estimated to hit 2.49 Tflop/sec. when it debuts within the next few weeks.

It looks like that Intel should be aiming for at least 4 Tflop/sec. for the second half of 2009.