Friday, April 10th 2009
Intel Displays Larrabee Wafer at IDF Beijing
Earlier this week, Intel conducted the Intel Developer Forum (IDF): Spring 2009 event at Beijing, China. Among several presentations on the the architectural advancements of the company's products, that include Nehalem and its scalable platforms, perhaps the most interesting was a brief talk by Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, on Larrabee. The term is Intel's first "many cores" architecture used to work as a graphics processor. The architecture will be thoroughly backed by low-level and high-level programming languages and tools by Intel.
French website Hardware.fr took a timely snap off a webcast of the event, showing Gelsinger holding a 300 mm wafer of Larrabee dice. The theory that Intel has working prototypes of the GPU deep inside its labs gains weight. Making use of current-generation manufacturing technologies, Intel is scaling the performance of x86 processing elements, all 32+ of them. As you can faintly see from the wafer, Larrabee has a large die. It is reported that first generation of Larrabee will be built on the 45 nm manufacturing process. Products based on the architecture may arrive by late 2009, or early 2010. With the company kicking off its 32 nm production later this year, Larrabee may be built on the newer process a little later.
Source:
Hardware.fr
French website Hardware.fr took a timely snap off a webcast of the event, showing Gelsinger holding a 300 mm wafer of Larrabee dice. The theory that Intel has working prototypes of the GPU deep inside its labs gains weight. Making use of current-generation manufacturing technologies, Intel is scaling the performance of x86 processing elements, all 32+ of them. As you can faintly see from the wafer, Larrabee has a large die. It is reported that first generation of Larrabee will be built on the 45 nm manufacturing process. Products based on the architecture may arrive by late 2009, or early 2010. With the company kicking off its 32 nm production later this year, Larrabee may be built on the newer process a little later.
62 Comments on Intel Displays Larrabee Wafer at IDF Beijing
Do i see it doing away with directx or opengl? hell no, why would something from one major company destroy or change all the microsoft, nvidia, amd, and game developers know when they didn't even make the move up to dx10.1(cept AMD). I just see larrabee and fusion being great technology that could be implemented or used as a great idea for mobile chips, and even smaller versions for netbooks, and other portable devices. The way things are now won't change drastically especially since it would require lots of time and resources to support a great change like one away from DirectX and OpenGL
www.techpowerup.com/index.php?77466
"An Intel Core i7 was able to "run" Crysis, on a resolution of 800 x 600, churning out a proud 7.36 frames per second"
larrabee is going to pwnnnnn an i7 at this.
Remember, GPUs, at their core, are just high FlOp processors.
I will believe it when I see it.
larrabee can do allot more then a gpu can
However, I do see larrabee as one of those things that isn't going to be used to its full power; sure, people will play games on it, and certain programs may even utilise some of its processing capabilities. But it is not truly useful if, for example, Windows can't use it as a CPU when booting! Loading times, when not bottlenecked by the HDD (24 SSD RAID Array?) would be amazingly short, programs would load in the blink of an eye, and you could load your favorite game in seconds and (hopefully) be able to play at good frame rates!
If larrabee cant do that, then there's no point.
The problem comes with drivers and driver support. Intel has yet to release competent drivers for it's current integrated graphics solutions. Not to mention the actual onboard graphics chips are underpowered and are absolute junk with regards to any type of 3D gaming.
Intel is going to need a huge new army of programmers/engineers to design and produce effective drivers, which fully utilize Larrabee's potential. Without that, it's just a shiny new piece of silicon with nowhere to go...
I think its a card.. but i might be wrong.
The GPU does most of the heavy lifting and the CPU handles the other tasks like caching images, queuing up sounds, etc.Their processors are bigger because of their inclusive cache design which means more memory and more memory means bigger processors...Remember, Intel IGPs are the most popular graphics chips in the world...