Intel Larrabee Gpu

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Intel Larrabee Gpu

Post by popnstyle » Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:38 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28GPU%29



http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/20 ... -sorta.ars
Quite some time ago, after the Pentium was obsolete and Intel had moved on, the company gave the RTL code for the processor to the Pentagon so that the military could continue to fabricate a radiation hardened version of it for use in military applications. Trailing-edge hardware like the Pentium has the advantage of having been thoroughly tested and debugged (cf. the P54C's infamous FDIV bug), and at the time the military had its own fab facilities that could do some low-volume fabrication. (I'm sure they still have such facilities for prototyping.) So the Pentagon cleaned up the P54C's RTL code and began producing a rad-hard version of the chip for military use. A few years later, when the Pentagon had moved on from the P54C, they offered the RTL back to Intel. So Intel took the core, which has a very small footprint and by this time had been pretty thoroughly debugged, and modified it for use in the many-core chip that later became Larrabee.

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editor ... F20c11.asp
Here’s what I do know:

Architecturally, Larrabee is quite interesting. It’s built out of an array of x86 cores, derivatives of the original Pentium, but given a very wide vector unit useful at crunching through highly parallel code—and graphics rendering code, at that. The first Larrabee may have fewer than 32 cores but, depending on how the power side of the equation works out, we may see configurations with 64-plus cores.

If Intel can get these cores to run at speeds much greater than 1GHz, we’re looking at a GPU with the raw power of AMD’s RV770 or Nvidia’s GT200 with 32 cores. The problem is that Larrabee won’t ship until sometime in 2009, when both AMD and Nvidia will be shipping GPUs that are much more powerful. If Intel can manage a 64- or 80-core version of Larrabee by that time or get clock speeds high enough (or both), then we may have a competitive high-end part from Intel. If not, then Intel will have to focus elsewhere in the market.

There’s nothing saying that Intel won’t ship Larrabee as a midrange part, it could very well be a GPU that targets the $100 to $150 market. That being said, Intel needs success at the high end, so I’m still expecting Larrabee to at least attempt to compete in the $300 to $500 market at first. Its success here will largely be determined by Intel’s ability to execute on the software side; it’ll need great drivers, and although Intel has some very important individuals working on the drivers, that’s not a guarantee of success.

Then we get to the question of whether Larrabee’s x86 support actually means anything. Nvidia’s answer is “No,” simply because Larrabee’s x86 support is quite limited; it doesn’t support any of the MMX or SSE additions to the x86 ISA. Larrabee supports the same x86 as the original Pentium, plus a lot of new Larrabee-specific instructions—it won’t run the same applications that your current Core 2s run without a recompile.

Eventually I think we’ll see Larrabee’s x86 and Intel’s “CPU” x86 converge, but that’ll take at least four years, so there’s clearly a long-term strategy at work here. But I find myself asking the same question again: Is x86 a strength?

For games, the x86 angle doesn’t really matter much. Larrabee’s cores are better at handling mixed sequential/parallel code than AMD or Nvidia’s, but that type of code isn’t really used in graphics rasterization in games. Larrabee’s gaming performance will really come down to how many cores Intel can cram on a single chip and how efficient its drivers and software renderer are. Intel does have the manufacturing advantage, but it’s unclear how significant that will be upon Larrabee’s launch. Larrabee will be a 45nm design and TSMC should be cranking out similarly small transistors by the end of 2009.

For nongaming applications, x86 itself doesn’t have any major strengths today, especially since it’s not the same x86 as what Intel CPUs run. Developers often complain about the complexities of developing for Nvidia’s GPUs using CUDA; they say that the threading model is too difficult to implement and the GPU lacks significant serial performance. The latter is an argument that won’t apply to Larrabee, which will allow Intel to succeed in some areas where AMD/Nvidia haven’t with their GPUs. The former, however, is something that could very well apply to Larrabee, as well: Developing for these highly parallel processors isn’t going to be easy.

The holy grail of writing your code and have it compile and run on an arbitrary number of cores just hasn’t been found yet, nor am I sure it actually exists. At this point, you have to change the way you develop to get the most power out of Nvidia’s GPUs using CUDA, and it’s not clear to me whether the same frustration will apply to Larrabee when it launches next year.

That being said, Intel has the best compiler team in the business, and as I mentioned a moment ago, I’m not a fortune teller. I’ve been racking my brain on this and many more Larrabee questions over the past couple of months, and I’m not sure I’m any closer to an answer. But answers are coming.

For those that are thinking Nividia and Intel are working together, they are by far from that and actully at odds with one another.

http://www.dailytech.com/NVIDIA+CEO+Wer ... e11448.htm
NVIDIA's already candid CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had more than a few things to say during the company's financial analyst meeting today. An hour into the call Huang began to ad lib; clearly something was on his mind.

"We're going to open a can of whoop ass," he told analysts, who quickly broke out into laughter.

For the past two weeks Intel and NVIDIA have been playing a game of cloak and dagger with technology press, complete with secret slide shows and secret slide show rebuttals. At the heart of this covert battle is the integrated graphics market, and some of the claims attached to it.

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http://www.computerworlduk.com/technolo ... wsid=16712
Intel said it is already shipping early versions of Larrabee graphics cards to game developers
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Post by kanabanoid » Tue Oct 06, 2009 7:25 am

intresting. but seems to me intel is not doing anything diffrent if intel releaces a GPU i would not be one of the first to buy. just as with their CPU's you do not go out and buy the first ones that hit the market. intel has just in the last 1.5 years gotton the 2 - 4 core cpu stable. and thoe they have been working on the chips with more cores for some time there has been and seemingly going to be for sometime to come the x86 issue
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Post by popnstyle » Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:18 am

I hear ya, what i am looking at is you have intel comeing out with that, you have nividia comeing out with the 300 gtx's and amd comeing out with the 5000 hds, so in that the 200 gtx's and the 4000 hds are going to drop down in price then the for the fact there will be a third competitor which makes for an even more of price wars for them. So I will probally go with a 4000 hd
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Post by kanabanoid » Tue Oct 06, 2009 2:09 pm

in all honesty the most demanding games out are crysis and C.O.H. and that S.O.A.S.E. and my system now can spank any of them. i will be waiting atleast 3-4 more years b4 i build again
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