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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pugster - Monday, March 24, 2008 - link
Intel core2duo is probably good for business, but the OS doesn't need need anything more than 2 cores running at an average of 2ghz. I know that there are people out there who wants the latest and greatest for games, but more and more people rather buy in a game console like the ps2 rather than putting money down for an geforce 9800. It seems that the only way for Intel to make money making new products like the silverthorne or going back on the flash memory race.PlasmaBomb - Thursday, March 20, 2008 - link
Since it is based on penryn isn't 16 MB of cache an odd number? Should that not be 18 MB? (i.e. 3 x dual cores at 6 MB each)IntelUser2000 - Sunday, March 23, 2008 - link
Plasmabomb, Penryn has 6MB L2, not L3. Dunnington has 16MB L3 in addition to the whatever L2 it will have, please read!perzy - Wednesday, March 19, 2008 - link
Larrabee, thats good news. Finally some competition in the graphics department!Let's face it, right now you can get 2 xbox 360's and an ipod for the price of one fast graphics card...that can't be right.
AcaClone - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
What can I say ...AcaClone - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
On second thought - I guess that it is possible that the demo software is indeed multithreaded, but that only one thread is running when left idle??ajg - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
The slide showing Intel: The architeturr for life is a page lifted from AMDs slide "Diversifying Platform Design Tracks"link below
http://www.tgdaily.com/index.php?option=com_conten...">http://www.tgdaily.com/index.php?option...mp;slide...
The CPU architecture is no different. I guess can't make expect an old dog to come up with new tricks?
clnee55 - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
Yes, AMD said it but couldn't do it. Easily said than donemicha90210 - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
Is that possible? There's a limit in XP to 3.25GB of ram. XP can't handle 16GB... is that picture real?oldhoss - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - link
I'd venture to guess either XP Pro x64, or Windows 2003 Server.