Spring IDF: Larrabee is GPGPU-only
Wednesday 18th April 2007, 04:20:00 PM, written by Arun
So, the presentation we published on Intel's VCG and Larrabee was clearly focused on the threat NVIDIA and AMD's GPUs posed to Intel's CPU business, because of GPGPU acceleration. But we still thought Intel wanted Larrabee to be good for 3D Games. It turns out that this might not be the case, according to a fairly ambiguous statement released by the company at IDF.
According to The Tech Report, Intel mentioned Larrabee at IDF but did not talk of gaming whatsoever, further stating that it "will include enhancements to accelerate applications such as scientific computing, recognition, mining, synthesis, virtualization, financial analytics and health applications." The keywords there are "enhancements to accelerate", which imply that these are actually fixed-function units.
This is incredibly important, because it also means the "fixed-function units" block we saw in the presentation's diagrams was actually not for 3D Graphics, but for these kinds of workloads. Nevertheless, Intel's VCG recruitment website has the following headline: "Be part of the next-generation in graphics and gaming experiences."
One possibility is that the first iteration of the architecture will be aimed exclusively at the GPGPU market, while a future derivative could be directed at the video gaming industry. Another (but less likely) possibility, of course, is that Intel is just trying to confuse everyone. Hopefully we'll know more about Larrabee after Intel's analyst day on May 3rd, however, as they have hinted they would be willing to disclose some long-term projects then during their 1Q07 conference call.
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