Intel reveals Larrabee details and Architecture

[ninzska21]

---

Intel has gone official and revealed several interesting Larrabee details during a briefing, saying more details are to be revealed at Siggraph 2008.

Although Intel still has a strong lead in the IGP market, the discrete graphics market is dominated by Nvidia and ATI, and Larrabee will finally allow Intel to lock horns with the graphics guys.

Larrabee will be based on Intel's x86 architecture, combining the best of both the CPU and GPU worlds, combining the CPU's programmability with the specialized architecture of a GPU.

"It looks like a GPU and acts like a GPU but actually what it's doing is introducing a large number of x86 cores into your PC," said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer. Intel describes the new chip as the industry's first "many-core" x86 Intel architecture, with dozens or hundreds of cores. This sounds a bit like Nvidia's "cores."

According to Larry Seiler, senior engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group, Larrabee's cores are derived from Pentium cores with added multithreading and 64-bit instructions. Each core will sport 256kb of L2 cache and the first generation Larrabees will have 8 to 48 cores depending on the market segment.

The Larrabee programming model supports a variety of highly parallel applications, allowing easy development of graphics APIs and GPGPU applications with current software development tools. The chip uses software-based task scheduling, which should allow more flexibility, and its architecture supports four execution threads per core with separate register sets per thread. The new chip uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network for fast, low latency communication between the cores.

"A key characteristic of this vector processor is a property we call being vector complete...You can run 16 pixels in parallel, 16 vertices in parallel, or 16 more general program indications in parallel," Seiler said.

More here

AnandTech: Intel's Larrabee Architecture Disclosure: A Calculated First Move

[ninzska21]

sounds solid

damn intel is dominating the graphics card market.. oh oh intel graphics onboard crap...

but with larrabee just around the corner.. i dont know wat will happen..

please dont die ATI and Nvidia...

and I HOPE THE DRIVER WILL BE DECENT

[butitoy]

sounds solid

damn intel is dominating the graphics card market.. oh oh intel graphics onboard crap...

but with larrabee just around the corner.. i dont know wat will happen..

please dont die ATI and Nvidia...

and I HOPE THE DRIVER WILL BE DECENT

ill shout that again bro..

please dont die ATI and Nvidia!!!

[spookey]

if intel's new solution is as good as what we are seeing on paper then nVidia and ATI will be in big trouble. hahay... faet!

[vladmire]

@spookey not nvidia or ati but US - consumers! waaaaaaaaaaaaa

[spookey]

of course. sure jud na apil ta ani na problema...

[goldfinger]

That wont happen. Intel cant even defeat ATI or NVIDIA when it comes to GPU.

AMD/NVIDIA are more experienced chipmaker for gpu, and Intel is just a little boy who dream.

Gipakita lang ta sa iyang dream but we dont know sa tinood coz its just a pictures and words.

My friend from US said, Intel daw maayo kaayo sa marketing maski bata i market nila pero sa tinood they just cant perform and provide the real thing.
Daghan mo prefer AMD did2 based sa american nga ako ka esturya.

Cheers.

[DrE]

mmm im not sure how these things will fare, but I always believed that one dedicated object will always be better at one job than the one that multitasks.

[goldfinger]

Yahh bro sak2 ka, focus sa usa ka company is important. If they focus on many products things will not work properly. I prefer sa focus chipmaker for GPU bcoz experienced sila maski unsa pana ug monopolize sa intel daghan mo harang nila.

[DrE]

mmm no, i think you didnt understand what i was saying.