Intel Larrabee @ SIGGRAPH 2008

Monday 02nd June 2008, 09:25:00 AM, written by Arun

Starting in August, part of the shroud of mystery around Larrabee is going to dissipate: A paper called 'Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing' will be presented at SIGGRAPH by its authors, which include Doug Carmean, Tom Forsyth, Michael Abrash, Pat Hanrahan and many others.

The paper's abstract describes Larrabee as using 'multiple in-order x86 CPU cores that are augmented by a wide vector processor unit, as well as fixed-function co-processors. This provides dramatically higher performance per watt and per unit of area than out-of-order CPUs on highly parallel workloads and greatly increases the flexibility and programmability of the architecture as compared to standard GPUs.'

Nothing revolutionary or that we didn't know before there, but we'll definitely be looking forward to this. No promise that I/we go to SIGGRAPH this year, but it's still relatively likely - plus, this likely won't be the only event where Intel presents Larrabee this year. It's worth pointing out that Larrabee will be competing head-on against NVIDIA and AMD's DX11 GPUs, not their current ones; sadly it seems unlikely that either company will be willing to disclose anything substantial about their next-generation architectures until well into 2009.

[Thanks to nAo for the tip!]

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