Watch Intel's First Demo of Larrabee GPGPU

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By Marcus Yam
published

Larrabee's raytracing Quake Wars: Enemy Territory!

While Intel makes many chips and technologies for all sorts of computing, its known for its CPUs. Now Intel is ready to take on a whole new challenge in the area of graphics with its upcoming Larrabee GPU.

Larrabee's raison d'être is to give Intel something to push back with against AMD and Nvidia. It won't be a direct competitor to Radeons and GeForces, as Larrabee is fundamentally different from present GPUs on the market

Notably, Larrabee's architecture is based off the Pentium P54C design and will use the x86 instruction set. The nature of the design makes Larrabee better suited to the term of the GPGPU. Larrabee is expected to function as a modest rasterizer, but could have the edge the computationally-heavy method of raytracing.

At IDF 2009, Intel made its first public demonstration of Larrabee – running on a Gulftown system, no less. Check it out in the video embedded below:

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
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42 Comments Comment from the forums
  • GPGPU Fail. When they take off the development name, will the marketing name be Intel Failchip?
    Reply
  • valcron
    Ok so that video showed me absolutely nothing. Or did I miss something?
    Reply
  • crom
    Is it me, or does that video look like its at quite a low frame rate?
    Reply
  • charlesxuma
    "keep simple things simple" .......... i'd like to hear more about that...also...was expecting more to it then a real time ray-tracing demo, at least an fps counter on the screen.... i guess thats part of the keep simple things simple campaign.
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    Hmmm interesting proof of concept but would of liked to see aplications something that most people use like games such as crysis, bioshock or stalker. Also programs such as 3dsmax or softidemage or arcmap.
    Reply
  • tektek
    So it cant play Crysis? ..ok joking aside.. this demo is not a good seller on the possibilities this could bring.. but so far i think WOW players will love finding cheaper laptops with no intigrated video cards that can play with more detail. Heavy gamers... not the time..not the place...................... YET!
    Reply
  • tntom
    What kind of power consumption are we looking at? I am completely sure this will never compete with high end GPUs performance wise but I would like to see a performance per watt comparison though.
    Reply
  • charlesxuma
    tektekSo it cant play Crysis? ..ok joking aside.. this demo is not a good seller on the possibilities this could bring.. but so far i think WOW players will love finding cheaper laptops with no intigrated video cards that can play with more detail. Heavy gamers... not the time..not the place...................... YET!
    who said anything about cheaper???? to me this looks like its gona be more expensive, plus i think theyd probably sell most builds if not all builds with discrete graphics only. however this does depend on how much larabee actually benchmarks, "give time, time".
    Reply
  • @tntom: could be wrong, but I believe prior reports indicated significantly higher TDP than similar performing GPUs (which is to say, the top GPUs from a couple generations ago)
    Reply
  • WheelsOfConfusion
    The demo was for real-time ray tracing, not standard rasterization. RTRT is a pretty intensive task, that's why most people choose the raster route.
    Of course, Larrabee will have to do rasterizing too, regardless of whether or not RTRT makes any headway.
    Reply