Some Information on Larrabee...
Full Article here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10006184-23.html
Not looking good...
Amd4Life!!
Full Article here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10006184-23.html
The paper is a pretty thorough summary of Intel's motives for developing Larrabee and the major features of the new architecture. Basically, Larrabee is about using many simple x86 cores--more than you'd see in the central processor (CPU) of the system--to implement a graphics processor (GPU). This concept has received a lot of attention since Intel first started talking about it last year
Intel describes the Larrabee cores as "derived from the Pentium processor," but I think perhaps this is an oversimplification. The design shown in the paper is only vaguely Pentium-like, with one execution unit for scalar (single-operation) instructions and one primarily for vector (multiple-operation) instructions.
The bottom line
So...what's Larrabee good for, and why did Intel bother with it?
I think maybe this was a science project that got out of hand. It came along just as AMD was buying ATI and so positioning itself as a leader in CPU-GPU integration. Intel had (and still has) no competitive GPU technology, but perhaps it saw Larrabee as a way to blur the line distinguishing CPUs from GPUs, allowing Intel to leverage its expertise in CPU design into the GPU space as well
the first Larrabee products will be too slow, too expensive, and too hot to be commercially competitive
Not looking good...
Amd4Life!!