Intel talks Larrabee GPU

Robert Hallock (Thrax) Intel speaks of its not-so-secret high-end GPU.

August 4, 2008 10:08 AM ET in News,

News broke a little over one year ago regarding Intel’s secretive “Larrabee” project, a massively-parallel GPU positioned to compete with NVIDIA’s premiere GPUs in 2009 or 2010. Fast forward to 2008 where the New York Times has gleaned some more info regarding Intel’s long-incubated technology.

Rather than developing larger, faster and hotter cores, Larrabee will boast 16 to 48 x86-compatible execution engines on a single board. Intel hopes that this will be competitive when pitted against next-generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs theorized to be massively-parallel operations with 500 or 600 micro-cores.

Intel knows that this is an important development for them. Doug Carmean, chief architect for the Larrabee project said that “this is on the level of the 432 or the Itanium.” He went on to imply that the unfortunate struggles they’ve had with those projects was a learning experience for Intel in the making of Larrabee.

It is expected that Larrabee will begin to see the light of day by 2010, with alpha silicon theorized to already be in the hands of developers to ready a healthy support ecosystem for the product.

5 Comments:

  1. RADA
    4 Aug '08, 2:22 pm

    Thrax,

    I've read very little on the Larrabee GPU, need some clarification:

    Is this product meant to directly compete with Nvdia's Uber & Mid-line of graphics cards, or is it meant for the On-Board graphics side of the industry? BOTH?

  2. Qeldroma
    4 Aug '08, 2:34 pm
    Quoting Thrax

    Rather than developing larger, faster and hotter cores, Larrabee will boast 16 to 48 x86-compatible execution engines on a single board. Intel hopes that this will be competitive when pitted against next-generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs theorized to be massively-parallel operations with 500 or 600 micro-cores.

    I'm not sure if they are going to be able to pull it off with this and make it compete. I would think that the x86 instruction set and memory format would make for too much overhead in both die real estate and execution speed. AMD/nVidia only care about what they need for graphics performance and streamline their cores accordingly (hence my suspicion about the numeric discrepancy in core numbers).

    However, it might make a decent Folding proc....but comparing it to the Itanium might be referring to the measure of sucess....

    Just thinkin' aloud.

  3. Thrax
    4 Aug '08, 2:56 pm

    The Larrabee is intended to compete directly with NVIDIA and AMD. The number of cores on the card will determine what market segment it's targeting.

  4. Buddy J
    4 Aug '08, 6:28 pm

    http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archi...080804fact.htm

    Info on it from Intel, and a link to the SIGGRAPH paper.

  5. kryyst
    5 Aug '08, 12:20 pm

    What's interesting is that along with this rumor is the rumor that NVIDIA is pulling out of the mobo chipset market and are instead only going to make video cards.

    I'm not going to really speculate on what the intel card will be capable of. However if they build an entire chipset around it and can really maximize the way the CPU works with their GPU's and everything else on the board they should be able to compete at the high end segment of the market. Plus I mean it is Intel that's throwing down here. They've certainly got the money to back any projects and wouldn't even be trying it if they didn't think they could compete. They've also got excellent name branding as well so it's not like they are some upstart company throwing in with the big boys.

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