Tuesday, May 12th 2009
Intel Larrabee Die Zoomed in
Intel chose the occasion of the opening ceremony for the Intel Visual Computing Institute at the Saarland University in Germany, to conduct a brief presentation about the visual computing technologies the company is currently working on. The focal point was Larrabee, the codename for Intel's upcoming "many-cores" processor that will play a significant role in Intel's visual computing foray way beyond integrated graphics. The die-shot reveals in intricate network of what look like the much talked-about x86 processing elements that bring about computing parallelism in Larrabee. Another slide briefly describes where Intel sees performance demands heading, saying that its growth is near-exponential with growth in common dataset sizes.
Source:
PC Games Hardware
23 Comments on Intel Larrabee Die Zoomed in
/wink
But yeah, still smoke and mirrors. I want fps figures.
this larrabee crap is based off their P54C, IE the PENTIUM MMX(LIKE 14 years old)
Remember, you need very little x86 to build a basic code base. The key to larrabee performance is the vector register extensions and special vector operators. Here's an introduction to vector registers: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD
x86 is very clever as a base. It means ANYONE (who can program! lol) can code it with a short learning curve, and existing IDE's can be used. Think of CUDA, but without having to learn somthing new or use new code libraries. Just use existing x86 code and add a few extra commands to handle the process of vector data.
As you can see, Intel is done trying to introduce new architectures to the market and will keep to its good old moneymaker (...errr, friend), the x86 architecture.
Having 100 bagillion megs of cache was the only reason it wasn't even worse.
Anyway, this Larrabee looks like something I'm definitely going to keep my eyes on!
I dont know how much experience Nvidia and ATI have compared to intel.
Intel have purely money, and cpu designs, they havnt really done gpu work since intel 740 which the whole GMA is built on, so must have been quite some transition!.
I guess they will get more in the game when theyve gained some more experience.
I guess ATI's market strategy is one of the best there is.
one architecture becomes many many many chips.
Small memory bus with GDDR5 for less complexity(4layerpcb vs 8 on high ends) and so on.
Multi-GPU.
However, i aint fully against larabee to be a good strategy, i'm just guessing that 3rd gen will start to become what we will look at as a solid card, and first gen to be a card with little perfection compared to ati and nvidia.
I dont suspect it to have a bad raw power, the strategy is surely interesting, but i'm wondering how really x86 can do gpu work, they might capture many costumers that need rendering, and math power with little work with API( like cuda and ati stream computing needs) this is in fact something intel aims for.