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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."
With the supposed death of Usenet, the closing of PARC, and the general Facebookification of the Internet, its nice to see a bunch of nerds get together and geek out simply for the sake of it.
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This is good news for Mac mini and MacBook users.
How so? Has Apple announced that it will adopt Larrabee for the Mac Mini or the MacBook? No. All you have are rumors and speculation by MacRumors and Ars Technica. When Apple says they will adopt the Larrabee GPU, then you can say that it is good news for Mac users of any stripe. Until then, it's just Intel news, not Apple news.
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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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I don't think so. I think the fact is that with the right architecture (which Intel is trying to get into place) which exact core on which processor handles a specific task should become less and less relevant.
What this technology will hopefully provide will be the ability to have a more flexible machine which can task cores for graphics, then re-task them for other needs as they come up. Your serious gamers and rendering heads will still have high end graphics cards, but this would allow more flexibility for the "generic" business build PC's.
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It almost certainly won't work. In the past, there has been a swing between general and special purpose hardware.
Except with unified shaders and earlier variations the GPU isn't that "special purpose" anymore. It's basicly an array of very small processors that individually are fairly general. Sure, they won't be CPUs, but I wouldn't be surprised if Intel could specialize their CPUs and make them into a competitive GPU. At the very least, good enough to eat a serious chunk upwards in the graphics market, as they're already big on integrated graphics.
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What most people don't seem to realize is that Larabee is not about winning the 3d performance crown. Rather, it is an attempt to change the playground: you aren't buying a 3d card for games. You are buying a "PC accelerator" that can do physics, video, 3d sound, dolby decoding/encoding etc. Instead of just having SSE/MMX on chip, you now get a complete separate chip. AMD and NVIDIA already try to do this with their respective efforts (CUDA etc), but Larabee will be much more programmable and will really pwn for massively parallel tasks. Furthermore, you can plug in as many Larabees as you want, no need for SLI/crossfire. You just add cores/chip like we now add memory.
P.