Detailed Larrabee Die shot shown by Intel

Go ahead and elaborate a little if you are going to pass judgment; I am dying to read your mythical wisdom on the matter.
 
JacobC1983 said:
Go ahead and elaborate a little if you are going to pass judgment; I am dying to read your mythical wisdom on the matter.
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LOL. I agree, unless he works for Intel's Visual Computing Group I'd say he's just trolling.
 
GoldenTiger said:
Care to explain the architectural flaws you see? Thought not... people like those at Beyond3D can glean a lot from the die shot but not you ;).
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Well, it's difficult to see from here, but I'm pretty sure they have the transistor arrangement all wrong. They have a couple of superfluous NAND gates in the lower left corner, too.
 
Obi_Kwiet said:
Well, it's difficult to see from here, but I'm pretty sure they have the transistor arrangement all wrong. They have a couple of superfluous NAND gates in the lower left corner, too.
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Plus, it's not Scottish.
 
So is Larrabee essentially a group pentium 1-like cpu's put together to act as a gpu? How many cores are going to be on one card?
 
450 said:
So is Larrabee essentially a group pentium 1-like cpu's put together to act as a gpu? How many cores are going to be on one card?
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Yeah, it's supposed to be a bunch of P1's stuck together.
I never thought I would see a die shrink of a processor from 1993. :p
 
Red Falcon said:
Yeah, it's supposed to be a bunch of P1's stuck together.
I never thought I would see a die shrink of a processor from 1993. :p
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Yep it's some pentiums with some fat mamajama 16-wide vector units tacked on. Should be fun to watch.
 
450 said:
So is Larrabee essentially a group pentium 1-like cpu's put together to act as a gpu? How many cores are going to be on one card?
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Very roughly, I'd be careful making that kind of comparison.

They are very small x86 instruction set cores, possibly based loosely on the Pentium architecture. But in order to make it ideal for graphics use, some things were removed, and some other things were likely added. A significant amount of work was done even at the single core level before they were all "put together".
 
of course when people cant figure out design improvement they will try to make stuff smaller and stick a whole bunch together.
 
TheBuzzer said:
of course when people cant figure out design improvement they will try to make stuff smaller and stick a whole bunch together.
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The x86 processor cores in Larrabee will be different in several ways from the cores in current Intel CPUs such as the Core 2 Duo or Core i7:

* Larrabee's x86 cores will be based on the much simpler Pentium P54C design which is still being maintained for use in embedded applications. [9] The P54C-derived core is superscalar but does not include out-of-order execution, though it has been updated with modern features such as x86-64 support, [8] similarly to Intel Atom. In-order execution means lower performance for individual cores, but since they are smaller, more can fit on a single chip, increasing overall throughput. Execution is also more deterministic so instruction and task scheduling can be done by compiler.

* Each Larrabee core contains a 512-bit vector processing unit, able to process 16 single precision floating point numbers at a time. This is similar to but four times larger than the SSE units on most x86 processors, with additional features like scatter/gather instructions and a mask register designed to make using the vector unit easier and more efficient. Larrabee derives most of its number-crunching power from these vector units.[8]

* Larrabee includes one major fixed-function graphics hardware feature: texture sampling units. These perform trilinear and anisotropic filtering and texture decompression.[8]

* Larrabee has a 1024-bit (512-bit each way) ring bus for communication between cores and to memory.[8] This bus can be configured in two modes to support Larrabee products with 16 cores or more, or fewer than 16 cores.[10]

* Larrabee includes explicit cache control instructions to reduce cache thrashing during streaming operations which only read/write data once.[8] Explicit prefetching into L2 or L1 cache is also supported.

* Each core supports 4-way simultaneous multithreading, with 4 copies of each processor register.[8]
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--wiki
 
There is only 2-3 companies that can do this, intel, amd and via, well, via doesnt have funds...

Wonder if the X86 method will kick off GPGPU!

I bet it wont be awesome, cause nvidia and ati have been in the game for a very long time. i dont suspect it to be absolutely rubish either.
 
They stated last year that it would have around the same performance as an 8800 level geforce. Since it's coming out in mid 2010, I'd have to say that it will become more like what the X3000 series is now... just good enough to keep nVidia and ATi from getting more IGP market share.
 
Do not want.

At least, in its day, the i740 didn't require software to be specifically written for it to achieve its (low) potential.

No market demand, it doesn't solve any technical problems that are holding things back. It's just a way for Intel to push graphics onto the CPU.
 
Draiko said:
They stated last year that it would have around the same performance as an 8800 level geforce. Since it's coming out in mid 2010, I'd have to say that it will become more like what the X3000 series is now... just good enough to keep nVidia and ATi from getting more IGP market share.
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except for the fact that its not an IGP and is a discrete video card.:rolleyes:
 
8800 perforance, so it will be the same performance range as the HD 4770?

Seems to be a beefy chip to fit in that speed and price range...
 
i thought larry was gonna be both integrated and discrete. i remember reading they were making a scaled down version of <16 cores an IGP and those with >16 were add-on dedicated cards.
 
450 said:
So is Larrabee essentially a group pentium 1-like cpu's put together to act as a gpu? How many cores are going to be on one card?
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Heh, this reminds me of an Intel event I went to back in the day. It was when they were getting ready to release the first Celerons, the cacheless 266 and 300 (non-A). The Intel guy's going on and on about how great it will be, and it's just like a Pentium II but cheaper, blah blah blah. One guy in the crowd raised his hand and said, "So it's like a 486 but faster?" "No no no, it's like a PII but cheaper because it doesn't have the cache!" "So it's like a 486 but faster?" "No, it's like a PII. But it doesn't have cache, so it's cheaper."

Technical details be damned, it's fun to watch sales guys get stuck repeating the only lines they know.
 
I don't think that Larrabee is going to be nearly as powerful as the upper midrange cards today, not at least in games but could be of course in other computing applications. But maybe after a couple of revisions and then when the software is more optimized and supported we may see a good competitor, which would be nice.
 
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