Intel Larrabee Capable of 2 TFLOPs

[Morgoth]

WTF you call that a gpu? thats not a gpu! thats 32 p4 cores stuck together on a card with a 300w tdp after a huge ass die shrink! WTF intel.. i expected much much much more from you, come on.. 32 p4 cores stuck together to make a gpu...

Those are not Netburst !

 

[panchoman]

Those are not Netburst !

aren't p4's nutburst?

 

[btarunr]

aren't p4's nutburst?

Where did you see 'P4' in the news post? That's P54C....of which Pentium Pro / MMX came up.

 

[panchoman]

Where did you see 'P4' in the news post? That's P54C....of which Pentium Pro / MMX came up.

oh, my bad.. wait so they're using like freaking p1's? wtf?

 

[DrPepper]

STILL i know for a fact 300w is alot for gpu i mean you could run a full pc on that nearly

My system only takes up about 320 watts as it stands quad core etc that will put it to 600 watt

 

[eidairaman1]

ok, the Pentium Pro, P2, P3, PM, C2, all relied on architecture for performance (P6)

486, Pentium, P4 and possibly Nehalem Rely heavily on Clock speed for performance.

 

[Megasty]

Heh, its a CPU on a silicon board, period. However, 2 TFLOPs is one damn powerful CPU. The 13+ year tech is a nice touch too. Just like the GMA IGP series was based off the i740 BS, this thing is based off some dinosaur bones that I'll end up remembering if I think about it long enough - & I won't. If games will accept the x86, then this thing will fly. If not, then it will flop, badly. No middle ground at all.

 

[btarunr]

Heh, its a CPU on a silicon board, period. However, 2 TFLOPs is one damn powerful CPU. The 13+ year tech is a nice touch too. Just like the GMA IGP series was based off the i740 BS, this thing is based off some dinosaur bones that I'll end up remembering if I think about it long enough - & I won't. If games will accept the x86, then this thing will fly. If not, then it will flop, badly. No middle ground at all.

Games have no role to play in compatibility. The driver and DirectX / OpenGL take care of it.

 

[Megasty]

Games have no role to play in compatibility. The driver and DirectX / OpenGL take care of it.

Great, then this have a real possibility of working but its still a huge experiment - but if it performs anywhere near the 4870x2 then it will be a ridiculous sucess. However, I'm still not counting any chickens yet

 

[B1gg3stN00b]

VIA!!! Fastest. Stuff. Ever.

Seriously, though, VIA was cool back in the day, but they pissed me off when the athlon 64s came out. Those boards were slow and buggy.

I learned that the hard way!

So many chipset driver problems!

 

[TheGuruStud]

since the core architecture (core solo/duo, and then onto core 2 duo/quad) designs came from a pentium 3 tualatin, his argument really falls down anyway. old cores that hit a tech limit can really be revilatised with new tech and die shrinks.

it's a pentium 3 b/c it has short pipelines? Hardly...

 

[WarEagleAU]

I guess this is what they mean by the Ray Tracing of their cards, using CPUs. For some reason, I thought larrabee was going to be made up of x86 cpu cores and also some type of gpu core. From the looks of it, its all a computer chips on an expansion card.

 

[btarunr]

No, it's 32 computer chips on a single (roughly 5cm x 5cm silicon die.).

Just like you have those 128 / 320 SP's, here, the SP is a x86 processor. It does better out-of-the-order execution,.... crunches numbers better.

Even if Larrabee fails as a GPU, it will most certainly be ported as a CPU, it will be the most powerful CPU ever made.

There's more:

If this thing is sold as a full card by Intel for say $600 (to remain competitive),
as a CPU (when ported to a central processing), even if it costs the same (sans any board, just the chip), you have the most powerful CPU for $600.....2000 TFLOPs on a desktop processor by 2009/10 howzzat?

 

[lemonadesoda]

Larrabee has 16 or 32 fully blown x86 cores. All clocked at 2Ghz. Never mind the graphics, just imagine sticking one of those babies in your PC for CUDA, PhysX, math libraries, or what have you. That card is going to outclass a PS3 at Folding@Home and match any $5000 "maths" add-in card that are used for specialist applications, at a price more like $200.

Unbelieveable power/price.

What is also in the pipeline is a mainboard with an empty socket. And you just plug in a Larrabee for extra zmog horsepower, just like those old x87 chips of yesteryear. Communication with main CPU is via Quickpath.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)

In fact, this is interesting. Based on the spec of each of those in-oder processors, with extra SIMD instructions, they look awfully like Intel 'Atoms'.

Perhaps this is how Intel will scale Westmere/Sandy Bridge. Rather than producing multi-versions of the CPU with core and various atom combinations, it will have just the cores. You then have an add-in socket where you can choose to add 8, 16 or 32 (or whatever) atoms as a Larrabee add-in chip.

Nice.

 

[a111087]

lol, they better not release it, but work their way for something more efficient...

 

[Swansen]

300 watts. Can you say nuclear reactor? What happened to efficiency, Intel?

I don't like where GPU's are heading. There's too much power draw for so little performance increase. This goes for all GPU makers. Something needs to be done to bring power demands back in line with the rest of computer components. They have enough trouble as it is squeezing last-generation high-end GPU's in notebooks, but this is just ridiculous.

FRIGGIN YES, i don't really get it ether, cards just eat up more and more power, but not at reasonable gains.

 

[Morgoth]

mybe it overclocks like a cpu mybe you can get 4ghz on water

 

[WarEagleAU]

Wow thanks BTA and Lemonade, I didnt know that. That is going to be a beast of a card/cpu. However, I wonder if in 2009/2010, if ATI/AMD and Nvidia wont have something better.

 

[eidairaman1]

Knowing Intel it will most likely be a EE class meaning over 1000 USD, basically consider it a Professional workstation card, not a Consumer Card.

No, it's 32 computer chips on a single (roughly 5cm x 5cm silicon die.).

Just like you have those 128 / 320 SP's, here, the SP is a x86 processor. It does better out-of-the-order execution,.... crunches numbers better.

Even if Larrabee fails as a GPU, it will most certainly be ported as a CPU, it will be the most powerful CPU ever made.

There's more:

If this thing is sold as a full card by Intel for say $600 (to remain competitive),
as a CPU (when ported to a central processing), even if it costs the same (sans any board, just the chip), you have the most powerful CPU for $600.....2000 TFLOPs on a desktop processor by 2009/10 howzzat?

 

[Solaris17]

mybe it overclocks like a cpu mybe you can get 4ghz on water

its a distinct possibility with the shrink etc...but keep in mind this is old arch even if it hits 2ghz like intel is saying remember that that might only be because of the die shrink anything past that and we might be hitting an arch limit. but then again who knows? maybe it was never an archlimit...maybe it was a design limit the old procs were made out of like ceramic lol and incorporated 5 elements now they use half the chart and purified silicon.

 

[Megasty]

Knowing Intel it will most likely be a EE class meaning over 1000 USD, basically consider it a Professional workstation card, not a Consumer Card.

That would be the last thing we need. Even if this thing performs around a 4870x2, that's no reason for Intel to go crazy & charge a grand for it. Unfortunately for them, they have competition at that lvl of gfx - unlike those sick EE class processors which are in a league of their own.

 

[swaaye]

based on the design of Pentuim P54C
Pentuim? is that some CPU i never heard of?

*cough spellcheck*

300W TDP... gack.

LOL @ the power use, yeah. I've read that this design is going to be most useful for GPGPU stuff like Physics, Folding, Video encoding, etc. It doesn't sound like it'll be best for graphics.

Pentium P54C is the Pentium 75-200 MHz. Pentium MMX (133-233 MHz) was P55C. Obviously this Larrabee chip isn't made out of 1996 Pentium CPUs. It would never clock above ~300 MHz if that were the case. They just used them as a architectural hint. Actually, the Atom CPU is based on a core from Larrabee, I think. Atom is similar to P54C too.

Atom's lack of speed vs. power use can be an indication of the potential of each Larrabee core. A Core 2 core is dramatically more powerful for most applications. Larrabee will only be fast for apps that can spread across its many cores.

 

[Weer]

If a ~70 GFLOPs Core 2 Extreme can do ~6 fps, guess what 2000 GFLOPs can.

I believe you are lying under a miscomprehension.

Larrabee will likely still be almost powerless in games, compared to even last generation GPU's. 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. That being said, it could still be great for CUDA, physics or.. just general computing. Because that's what scalar-based "CPU ALU's" are good for - everything, but they perform at it much less proficiantly.

That being said, this is fascinating to even draw up. I would want to see it in action.

 

[effmaster]

Guys you gotta remember that this is Intels FIRST REAL PUSH into the dedicated graphics card market. The fact that their first GPU will be this powerful already says alot about it so relax. Intel will continue to improve on its GPUS. If its less powerful than what its competitors are when its released then it will more than likely have a lower price tag so yay for that.
I dont think that intel is expecting a whole lot from their first dedicated graphics card.
People need top stop complaining about how the intel graphics card will be using old architecture. If the old architecture works then whats to complain about? I dont have a beef as long as its not overpriced and gives a bad framerate for games. None of which we are sure on yet.

 

[AphexDreamer]

I just learned everything about it here. Might clear up some confusion other people are having.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/clearing-up-the-confusion-over-intels-larrabee.ars

"the cores will also have a super-wide 512-bit vector FPU that's capable of processing sixteen-element floating-point vectors (single precision), along with support for control flow instructions (loops and branches) and some scalar computations."

That sounds interesting ^