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."

Comments

Re:Good old SIGGRAPH

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Good news

[gnasher719]

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.

Re:Ray Tracing -v- Rasterization

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:OpenGL

[TheRaven64]

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.