Larrabee

Larrabee is the Intel company ( GPU ) chip code. While Intel has no independent core of the show, but over the years the integrated graphics chip manufacturing capacity and can not be ignored. Larrabee belongs to Intel teraflops computing program, based on programmable architecture, mainly for high-end general purpose computing platform, at least 16 core 1.7-2.5GHz, frequency, power consumption is in 150W above, support JPEG texture, physical acceleration, anti-aliasing, enhanced AI, ray tracing and other characteristics. The key is Intel will allow himself to introduce GPU X86 instruction, this makes the program more simple, the data exchange between CPU can keep consistency, greatly reduce the graphical application development cycle and difficulty.

Technical specifications

Larrabee with a high degree of flexibility, expansibility, and it is expected to become the Larrabee 's biggest characteristic. According to Intel, this property in" war machine"," F . E. A . R."," half life 2: chapter second", the game show is the most apparent, actual performance with the number of basic core linear growth trend. If the 8 core performance as 1, then the 16 core is approximately equal to 2, 24 core approximately equal to 3, 32 core of approximately equal to 4.

If you have this growth continues, the Larrabee strength would be terrible, but Intel also admitted that, along with the core volume continues to increase, this linear relationship would be weakened, the 40 core only 48 3.8-3.9, only 4.4-4.6 core, 64 core may have less than 7.

Interestingly, Intel also noted that Larrabee" fully supports the IEEE standard single, double precision floating point arithmetic", but did not disclose the specific index. AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards in a single precision performance is excellent, RV770 series has been easily over 1TFlops, but double precision performance still differ very far, such as Tesla single precision performance of up to 900-1000GFlops, double precision is only about 100GFlops.

Intel confirmed at the same time, Larrabee full support for DirectX, OpenGL, API existing, but also can provide our new API technology, used to support the new features. Details were not disclosed, but the focus should be on how to give full play to the advantages of a large number of X86 core parallel computing.

Larrabee will also use 1024-bit bi-directional ring bus, each direction 512-bit, similar to the ATI R600 architecture.

In December 9, 2009, Intel company officially confirmed will cancel code-named Larrabee GPU product launch plan, main reason is product performance and driving development lagged far behind the original plan.