Intel Details Nehalem CPU and Larrabee GPU

Vigile writes "Intel previewed the information set to be released at IDF next month including details on a wide array of technology for server, workstation, desktop and graphics chips. The upcoming Tukwila chip will replace the current Itanium lineup with about twice the performance at a cost of 2 billion transistors and Dunnington is a hexa-core processor using existing Core 2 architecture. Details of Nehalem, Intel's next desktop CPU core that includes an integrated memory controller, show a return of HyperThreading-like SMT, a new SSE 4.2 extension and modular design that features optional integrated graphics on the CPU as well. Could Intel beat AMD in its own "Fusion" plans? Finally, Larrabee, the GPU technology Intel is building, was verified to support OpenGL and DirectX upon release and Intel provided information on a new extension called Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) for SSE that would improve graphics performance on the many-core architecture."

Comments

Ummmmm, no

[Sycraft-fu]

First off, new integrated Intel chipsets do just find for desktop acceleration. One of our professors got a laptop with an X3000 chip and it does quite well in Vista. All the eye candy works and is plenty snappy.

However, this will be much faster since it fixes a major problem with integrated graphics: Shared RAM. All integrated Intel chipsets nab system RAM to work. Makes sense, this keeps costs down and that is the whole idea behind them. The problem is it is slow. System RAM is much slower than video RAM. As an example, high end systems might have a theoretical max RAM bandwidth of 10GB/sec if they have the latest DDR3. In reality, it is going to be more along the lines of 5GB/sec in systems that have integrated graphics. A high end graphics card can have 10 TIMES that. The 8800 Ultra has a theoretical bandwidth over 100GB/sec.

Well, in addition to the RAM not being as fast, the GPU has to fight with the CPU for access to it. All in all, it means that RAM access is just not fast for the GPU. That is a major limiting factor in modern graphics. Pushing all those pixels with multiple passes of textures takes some serious memory bandwidth. No problem for a discrete card, of course, it'll have it's own RAM just like any other.

In addition to that, it looks like they are putting some real beefy processing power on this thing.

As such I expect this will perform quite well. Will it do as good as the offerings from nVidia or ATi? Who knows? But this clearly isn't just an integrated chip on a board.

Re:Nehalem? Larrabee?

[TheRaven64]

But before they laughed, I remember a bunch of companies folded up their project tents (sun, mips, I think you are mistaken. MIPS still exists, but SGI stopped using it. HP killed both PA RISC and Alpha, but they co-developed Itanium, so it isn't entirely surprising. Sun kept developing chips, and currently hold the performance-per-watt crown for a lot of common web-server tasks.