Opening the Kimono: Intel Details Nehalem and Tempts with Larrabee
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 17, 2008 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The final topic of discussion today was Larrabee, Intel's highly parallel microprocessor architecture that lends itself very well to 3D graphics applications:
Larrabee will be out in the 2009 - 2010 timeframe, most likely as a standalone GPU to compete with offerings from AMD and NVIDIA. The architecture is a many-core design, with many very small, simple IA cores behind a brand new cache architecture:
Each core will support a new vector instruction set that Intel has been working with game developers to perfect. Each core will obviously have a very wide vector processing unit, but Intel isn't detailing much more on Larrabee. You can expect Larrabee to support both DirectX and OpenGL, but it will truly shine if game developers target its ISA directly.
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ocyl - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
It appears that Intel views this not necessarily from a perspective of technology / end product, but one of foundry. There is nothing wrong with it, however; it's just a bit odd at first and takes some time in getting used to.Che - Monday, March 17, 2008 - link
Wow, 16 threads! Got to hand it to Intel, they are on top of their game for sure.Griswold - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
Now all we need is a (desktop) windows that can actually do something good with 8 logical (or more) cores.