http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Shows-More-Details-on-Larrabee-91352.shtml
Intel Shows More Details on
Larrabee
The new 'visual computing'
architecture differs radically from today's graphics processors
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Intel decided it's high time to give us a few more details on its
upcoming Larrabee 'visual computing' architecture. The company talked a
little more about the discrete graphics product it plans to launch
somewhere in the 2009-2010 time frame. Some pieces of information on
the new technology had already been made public by the chips
manufacturer, but no specifications on the way it actually works or on
how much it can offer have been published until now.
Intel's presentation to analysts and journalists unveiled the fact that
Larrabee would
feature from 8 to 48 cores, depending on the model, just the way
CPUs do. The idea behind the new architecture, the company says, it to
push the graphics beyond gaming. Larrabee will not be compared to the
current graphics processors on the market, as it relies on CPU
programmability and GPU multi-parallelism, featuring many smaller
cores, compared to the single or dual core architecture ATI and Nvidia
offer on their current cards.
The many-core x86 design of Intel's graphics solution promises "full
support of current graphics APIs", as well as a starting point for the
development of APIs with new features. According to the company, the
x86 coding will provide advantages and unique characteristics that
cannot be found in a GPU. A 1024 bits-wide bi-directional ring network
(512 bits in each direction) has been developed for Larrabee, enabling
the communication between agents in low latency manner, and Intel says
that this will be a "super fast communication between cores".
We have
already showed
how each Larrabee core is a full x86 one and that the product is based
on a modernized dual-issue Pentium design featuring a short execution
pipeline. The design received enhancements through a vector processing
unit (VPU; 16 32-bit ops per clock), multi-threading (4x with separate
register sets per thread), 64-bit extensions and sophisticated
pre-fetching.
The company has described Larrabee as highly scalable from the
beginning, which means that the 48-core architecture is a plausible
one. Previous rumors pointed to such numbers, and some went even to the
128-core mark. Still, the eight-core chip is the one we should probably
expect for the 2009-2010 period. The number of threads the product can
deal with simultaneously rises up from 32 to 192 when it comes to
Hyperthreading.
Intel
said that the performance level Larrabee could reach is a secret, when
a question on how many cores are required to match the power of an
Nvidia or an ATI GPU popped up. We should expect the chips manufacturer
to come to the market with a product capable of more than is available
at the time of launch.
According to Intel, the one feature
that matters the most in Larrabee would be scalability, since the
company said that linear scaling is available for games like Gears of
War, FEAR or Half-Life 2, Episode 2. The performance brought by eight
cores will be doubled at 16 and tripled at 24, while 32 cores would
bring four times that speed. As Intel says, that is "almost linearly",
or "linearly within 10%," if rephrased.
Among other
interesting features of Larrabee, the company announced the full
support for the "IEEE standards for single and double precision
floating-point arithmetic". The support for double-precision processing
is featured by AMD's and Nvidia's GPGPUs as well, but they suffer
performance losses when facing double-precision apps. The Tesla cards
were presented by Nvidia as capable of 900 GFlops to 1 TFlops in
single-precisions, but the performance drops to 100 GFlops in
double-precisions. Intel said nothing about double-precision
environments affecting Larrabee. |
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