Intel Showcases Dunnington, Nehalem and Larrabee Processors

Name: Intel Showcases Dunnington, Nehalem and Larrabee Processors - Page 2
Brand: Intel

by Dave Altavilla — Monday, March 17, 2008, 09:00 AM EDT

Intel Larrabee Visual Computing Architecture

Intel's Gelsinger brought their quick, efficient press conference to a close with a shot across the bow of NVIDIA and AMD-ATI, giving us a view into their forward-looking Larrabee visual computing architecture. Only described by Gelsinger as a "many core" design, Larrabee is expected to take advantage of a scalable array of IA cores and a new cache architecture, along with a new vector instruction set; complimentary to, or a super-set perhaps of AVX.

Larrabee will also have a custom-designed vector processing unit and a highly programmable architecture that will make it useful for traditional graphics workloads HD Digital Video processing and 3D effects like global illumination. And although Intel will be fostering other methods of 3D rendering like ray-tracing, the chip will be compatible with DirectX and OpenGL and is expected to offer "competitive" performance to incumbent GPU architectures from NVIDIA and AMD-ATI. Gelsinger was quick to point out that the ISV and developers he has spoken to about Larrabee are extremely excited about its prospects, more so than any other architecture he's been involved with recently at Intel. We're told that Intel will demo Larrabee later this year with a launch sometime in 2009 or beyond.