The facts:
Larrabee will differ from other discrete GPUs currently on the market such as the GeForce 200 Series and the Radeon 4000 series in three major ways:
Larrabee will use the x86 instruction set with Larrabee-specific extensions.
Larrabee will feature cache coherency across all its cores.
Larrabee will include very little specialized graphics hardware, instead performing tasks like z-buffering, clipping, and blending in software, using a tile-based rendering approach. A renderer implemented in software can more easily be modified, allowing more differentiation in appearance between games or other 3D applications. Intel's SIGGRAPH 2008 paper mentions order-independent transparency, irregular Z-buffering, and real-time raytracing as rendering features that can be implemented with Larrabee.
Each Larrabee core contains a 512-bit vector processing unit, able to process 16 single precision floating point numbers at a time. This is similar to but four times larger than the SSE units on most x86 processors, with additional features like scatter/gather instructions and a mask register designed to make using the vector unit easier and more efficient. Larrabee derives most of its number-crunching power from these vector units.
Larrabee has a 1024-bit (512-bit each way) ring bus for communication between cores and to memory. This bus can be configured in two modes to support Larrabee products with 16 cores or more, or fewer than 16 cores.
Rumors:
It is said that Larrabee will be 5x faster than the current Geforce 295 GTX.
It is said that Crysis can be played at maximum settings with 80fps.
My opinion:
I think Larrabee will be a God-send video card. Intel will put an end to ATI and NVIDIA-empire video card manufacturers. No more monopoly and dictatorship from ATI and NVIDIA.
I really like Intel to put an end to this madness.
Larrabee will differ from other discrete GPUs currently on the market such as the GeForce 200 Series and the Radeon 4000 series in three major ways:
Larrabee will use the x86 instruction set with Larrabee-specific extensions.
Larrabee will feature cache coherency across all its cores.
Larrabee will include very little specialized graphics hardware, instead performing tasks like z-buffering, clipping, and blending in software, using a tile-based rendering approach. A renderer implemented in software can more easily be modified, allowing more differentiation in appearance between games or other 3D applications. Intel's SIGGRAPH 2008 paper mentions order-independent transparency, irregular Z-buffering, and real-time raytracing as rendering features that can be implemented with Larrabee.
Each Larrabee core contains a 512-bit vector processing unit, able to process 16 single precision floating point numbers at a time. This is similar to but four times larger than the SSE units on most x86 processors, with additional features like scatter/gather instructions and a mask register designed to make using the vector unit easier and more efficient. Larrabee derives most of its number-crunching power from these vector units.
Larrabee has a 1024-bit (512-bit each way) ring bus for communication between cores and to memory. This bus can be configured in two modes to support Larrabee products with 16 cores or more, or fewer than 16 cores.
Rumors:
It is said that Larrabee will be 5x faster than the current Geforce 295 GTX.
It is said that Crysis can be played at maximum settings with 80fps.
My opinion:
I think Larrabee will be a God-send video card. Intel will put an end to ATI and NVIDIA-empire video card manufacturers. No more monopoly and dictatorship from ATI and NVIDIA.
I really like Intel to put an end to this madness.
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