Larrabee Based On a Bundle of Old Pentium Chips

arcticstoat writes "Intel's Pat Gelsinger recently revealed that Larrabee's 32 IA cores will in fact be based on Intel's ancient P54C architecture, which was last seen in the original Pentium chips, such as the Pentium 75, in the early 1990s. The chip will feature 32 of these cores, which will each feature a 512-bit wide SIMD (single input, multiple data) vector processing unit."

Comments

What the hell is Larrabee?

[vondo]

A little context might help. This isn't the Inquirer for god's sake.

Re:What the hell is Larrabee?

[TransEurope]

Interesting is also that intel expects a maximum power consumption of at least 300 Watts. I personally expect nothing from that thing. The ancient technology of the cores and the perspective of building a system serving and cooling a hotspot of 300 Watts doesn't make these cards my favourite choice yet. I#m very sceptic about Intes try of making a high end graphic board. I really can't imagine that old cores of first gen Pentiums will be able to compete with modern stream processing units. I'm wondering that Intel wasn't able to choose some RISC-design at least, maybe i960.

Re:What the hell is Larrabee?

[poetmatt]

Not only is the power retarded, but ATI already can do 100% native ray tracing which crushed intel bigtime.

I welcome intel trying to push for marketshare but it's going to be many generations before intel can play catchup on graphics cards...specifically when we get around to 32+GB of ram and you can afford a couple gigs for graphics (at which point we'll need 4+ gigs for graphics probably), the performance of an integrated solution will still be lacking. Graphics bandwidth and needs increases far exponentially beyond that of processing needs for anything graphics intensive by definition (currently).

good.

[apodyopsis]

good. sounds like a sensible engineering decision.

on the basis that..
the design is well known, understood and has had rigorous testing in the field
they will no doubt fix any understood errors firstlimits the RnD to the multicore section

as long as the chip performs well for the silicon overhead then they should feel free to cram as many in as they want.

seems perfectly sensible to me.

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Re:Pentium 75?

[SETIGuy]

they're nothing hypocritical about saying that the original Pentium 1 was a pretty bad chip, and the Core 2 Duo is a pretty great one.

Have you compared the total length of Pentium errata with the length of the Core 2 Duo errata?