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NOTE:Earlyer today the story was posted at another site and removed after 2½ hours online.
Intel's upcoming Larrabee chip will pack nearly two billion transistors and 64 tiny x86 processor cores. That's what sources close to Intel's intriguing co-processor project have told TechRadar today.
Factor in an expected operating frequency of at least 2GHz and it's likely Larrabee will have four to five times the raw computational grunt of the fastest current graphics chips.
Now, you might be wondering whether this is just another throw away rumour, a headline grabbing stab in the dark. Certainly Larrabee remains a long way out. It won't appear until the end of next year at the absolute earliest. Much can change in that time.
But if you cast your web browser back to last summer, you may remember a little story we broke. We suggested that Larrabee's core architecture would be based on the Pentium MMX CPU of the late 1990s. And whaddya know, that turned out to be true.
So, what else do we know about Larrabee? We're told the first generation chip will be available in both 64 and 32 core flavours (though we're not sure if both will be go at launch). The chip itself is said to be big, really big.
In fact, it's on a similar scale to Intel's recently released six-core Xeon server chip, codenamed Dunnington. Indeed, Dunnington is built using essentially the same 45nm silicon process as Larrabee will use and packs 1.9 billion transistors. In other words, Intel is already making a Larrabee-scale x86 chip with existing technology.
We also hear the board that Larrabee will be strapped to looks very much like a conventional graphics card complete with a large but not ludicrous cooling solution.
Of course, what we all really want to know is how powerful Larrabee will be. Well, that's something we can also shed some light on, at least in theoretical throughput terms.
Intel has revealed that each Larrabee core will pack a supercharged ALU capable of 16 vector operations per cycle. With 64 cores that works out to no less than 1,024 vector ops per cycle. By comparison, AMD's top GPU, the Radeon HD 4870, can do 800 per cycle while NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 knocks out a relatively modest 240.
The next part of the equation, of course, is operating frequencies, or how many cycles a chip can crank out per second. NVIDIA's GPUs tend to have high shader frequencies of around 1.5 to 1.7GHz, helping to close the performance gap to AMD's typically wider ALU arrays which currently operate well below 1GHz.
But how fast will Larrabee run? That's probably the hardest attribute to pin down since attainable clockspeeds are so sensitive to the quality of final production chips. But expect something in the range of 2GHz to 2.5GHz.
If we roll with the more conservative forecast, here's how Larrabee lines up compared with the best current technology:
The Specs
Intel Larrabee: 1,024 vectors at 2GHz
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 280: 240 vectors at 1.6GHz
AMD Radeon HD 4870: 800 vectors at 725MHz.
As things stand, that makes Larrabee around four to five times as powerful as anything available today. Needless to say, AMD and NVIDIA will not be stand still between now and the launch of Larrabee. As NVIDIA's Ben Barraondo says, "NVIDIA has never stood still in the market. We're more than confident we'll be very competitive will Larrabee when it eventually arrives."
There's also a big difference between theoretical throughput and usable performance. That's even more true in the context of Larrabee's revolutionary programmable architecture. With a software controlling nearly the entire rendering pipeline, gauging how efficiently Larrabee will use its compute resources is currently impossible.
What's more, raw vector throughput is just one, extremely simplified, metric of performance. Larrabee will need to perform well in many other areas. But on paper, at least, it looks like it will be right up there with the best at launch.
So now you know why Intel is so bullish about the prospects of its brand new GPU-killing architecture in the face of AMD and NVIDIA's tried and tested chips. And now you know why the industry is so excited about Larrabee.
Source
Intel's upcoming Larrabee chip will pack nearly two billion transistors and 64 tiny x86 processor cores. That's what sources close to Intel's intriguing co-processor project have told TechRadar today.
Factor in an expected operating frequency of at least 2GHz and it's likely Larrabee will have four to five times the raw computational grunt of the fastest current graphics chips.
Now, you might be wondering whether this is just another throw away rumour, a headline grabbing stab in the dark. Certainly Larrabee remains a long way out. It won't appear until the end of next year at the absolute earliest. Much can change in that time.
But if you cast your web browser back to last summer, you may remember a little story we broke. We suggested that Larrabee's core architecture would be based on the Pentium MMX CPU of the late 1990s. And whaddya know, that turned out to be true.
So, what else do we know about Larrabee? We're told the first generation chip will be available in both 64 and 32 core flavours (though we're not sure if both will be go at launch). The chip itself is said to be big, really big.
In fact, it's on a similar scale to Intel's recently released six-core Xeon server chip, codenamed Dunnington. Indeed, Dunnington is built using essentially the same 45nm silicon process as Larrabee will use and packs 1.9 billion transistors. In other words, Intel is already making a Larrabee-scale x86 chip with existing technology.
We also hear the board that Larrabee will be strapped to looks very much like a conventional graphics card complete with a large but not ludicrous cooling solution.
Of course, what we all really want to know is how powerful Larrabee will be. Well, that's something we can also shed some light on, at least in theoretical throughput terms.
Intel has revealed that each Larrabee core will pack a supercharged ALU capable of 16 vector operations per cycle. With 64 cores that works out to no less than 1,024 vector ops per cycle. By comparison, AMD's top GPU, the Radeon HD 4870, can do 800 per cycle while NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 knocks out a relatively modest 240.
The next part of the equation, of course, is operating frequencies, or how many cycles a chip can crank out per second. NVIDIA's GPUs tend to have high shader frequencies of around 1.5 to 1.7GHz, helping to close the performance gap to AMD's typically wider ALU arrays which currently operate well below 1GHz.
But how fast will Larrabee run? That's probably the hardest attribute to pin down since attainable clockspeeds are so sensitive to the quality of final production chips. But expect something in the range of 2GHz to 2.5GHz.
If we roll with the more conservative forecast, here's how Larrabee lines up compared with the best current technology:
The Specs
Intel Larrabee: 1,024 vectors at 2GHz
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 280: 240 vectors at 1.6GHz
AMD Radeon HD 4870: 800 vectors at 725MHz.
As things stand, that makes Larrabee around four to five times as powerful as anything available today. Needless to say, AMD and NVIDIA will not be stand still between now and the launch of Larrabee. As NVIDIA's Ben Barraondo says, "NVIDIA has never stood still in the market. We're more than confident we'll be very competitive will Larrabee when it eventually arrives."
There's also a big difference between theoretical throughput and usable performance. That's even more true in the context of Larrabee's revolutionary programmable architecture. With a software controlling nearly the entire rendering pipeline, gauging how efficiently Larrabee will use its compute resources is currently impossible.
What's more, raw vector throughput is just one, extremely simplified, metric of performance. Larrabee will need to perform well in many other areas. But on paper, at least, it looks like it will be right up there with the best at launch.
So now you know why Intel is so bullish about the prospects of its brand new GPU-killing architecture in the face of AMD and NVIDIA's tried and tested chips. And now you know why the industry is so excited about Larrabee.
Source
