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Intel Reveals More Larrabee Architecture Details
Ninjakicks writes "Intel is presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH 2008 industry conference in
Los Angeles on Aug. 12 that describes features and capabilities of its
first-ever forthcoming many-core architecture, codenamed Larrabee.
Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the
software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core programming model and
performance analysis for several applications. Initial product
implementations of the Larrabee architecture will target discrete graphics
applications, support DirectX and OpenGL, and run existing games and programs.
Additionally, a broad potential range of highly parallel applications including
scientific and engineering software will benefit from the Larrabee native C/C++
programming model."
Unlike, say, any other academic conference where exactly the same thing happens. People don't go to SIGGRAPH for the sake of it, they go because it's the ACM Special Interest Group on GRAPHics main conference and getting a paper accepted there gets people in the graphics field a lot of respect. Many of the other ACM SIG* conferences are similar, and most other academic conferences are similar in form, but typically smaller.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think it depends on how much Larrabee will cost, however with what we know so far Apple seems to be heading into multi-CPU architectures, so using Larrabee would make sense.
Larrabee costs somewhere between 150 and 300 Watt, so MacBooks and Mac Minis are not likely to use them. Mac Pro, on the other hand, possibly.
No, because the article is about Intel explaining that the purpose of Larrabee is NOT to be specialised like that. It's meant to be a completely programmable architecture that you can use for rasterization, ray tracing, folding, superPi or whatever else you want to program onto it.
Basically, they're trying to say "it's not REALLY a GPU as such, it's actually a really fat, very parallel processor. But you can use it as a GPU if you really want to".
It almost certainly won't work. In the past, there has been a swing between general and special purpose hardware. General purpose is cheaper, special purpose is faster. When general purpose catches up with 'fast enough' then the special purpose dies. The difference now is that 'cheap' doesn't just mean 'low cost' it also means 'low power consumption,' and special-purpose hardware is always lower power than general-purpose hardware used for the same purpose (and can be turned off completely when not in use).
If you look at something like TI's ARM cores, they have a fairly simple CPU and a whole load of specialist DSPs and DSP-like parts that can be turned on and off independently.
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The Quake engine uses OpenGL (or its own software renderer, but I doubt anyone uses that anymore), so games based on it do use OpenGL. Most open source games that use 3D use it, as do most OS X games, and quite a lot of console games. OpenGL ES is supported on most modern mobile phone handsets (all Symbian handsets, the iPhone and Android) and the PS3. I don't know why you'd think OpenGL was dead or dying - it's basically the only way of writing portable 3D code that you want to benefit from hardware acceleration at the moment.
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OpenGL is just an abstraction layer. Mesa implements OpenGL entirely in software. Implementing it 'in hardware' doesn't really mean 'in hardware' either, it means implementing it in software for a coprocessor that has an instruction set better suited to graphical operations than the host machine.
Sure, you could write your own rasteriser for Larrabee, but it wouldn't make sense to do so. If you use an off-the-shelf one then a lot more people are likely to be working on optimising it. And if you're implementing an off-the-shelf rasteriser, then implementing an open specification like OpenGL for the API makes more sense than making everyone learn a new one, and means that there's already a load of code out there that can make use of it.
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That is much more detailed than the one linked in the article summary. It can be found here.