Nvidia Claims Intel's Larrabee Is "a GPU From 2006"

Barence sends this excerpt from PC Pro: "Nvidia has delivered a scathing criticism of Intel's Larrabee, dismissing the multi-core CPU/GPU as wishful thinking — while admitting it needs to catch up with AMD's current Radeon graphics cards. 'Intel is not a stupid company,' conceded John Mottram, chief architect for the company's GT200 core. 'They've put a lot of people behind this, so clearly they believe it's viable. But the products on our roadmap are competitive to this thing as they've painted it. And the reality is going to fall short of the optimistic way they've painted it. As [blogger and CPU architect] Peter Glaskowsky said, the "large" Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI.' Speaking ahead of the opening of the annual NVISION expo on Monday, he also admitted Nvidia 'underestimated ATI with respect to their product.'"

Comments

Larrabee as a rasteriser...

[HonkyLips]

A recent journal article on ArsTechnica points to an Intel blog on Larrabee: http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/05/01/larrabee-engineer-on-personal-blog-larrabee-is-all-about-rasterization Curious.

Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers

[Excors]

Intel is aiming at number crunchers (note that their chip uses doubles, not floats).

That's not true. From their paper:

Larrabee gains its computational density from the 16-wide vector processing unit (VPU), which executes integer, single-precision float, and double-precision float instructions.

And it's definitely aimed largely at games: the paper gives performance studies of DirectX 9 rendering from Half Life 2, FEAR and Gears of War.

Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers

[Anpheus]

Did you not see the bit right after where you bolded text? ... double-precision float...

Repudiating my own quote

[Ideaphile]

Although I appreciate the attention from NVIDIA and Slashdot, I can't support that alleged quote from my blog (http://speedsnfeeds.com).

First, what's being described as a quote is actually just John Montrym's summary from my original post, which is here:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10006184-23.html

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage... graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself-- running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1 GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that it would take somewhere from 7 to 25 Larrabee cores to reach that 60 Hz frame rate.

Larrabee will probably run much faster than that, at least on desktop variants.

Well... rather than writing the whole response here, I think I'd rather write it up for my blog and publish it there. Please surf on over and check it out:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10024280-23.html

Comments are welcome here or there.

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Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers

[CajunArson]

Both Intel and nVidia - proprietary driver companies - should be on defensive right now.
You obviously don't know much about Intel's commitment to open-source in its drivers. Instead of recently dumping some of the specs to its chips to the community at large, Intel has actively paid developers to maintain top-quality 100% FOSS drivers for Linux and X11 for years, making its commitment light-years ahead of ATI or Nvidia. Ever hear of Keith Packard, you know, the leading developer of the entire X system? He's an Intel employee. For all the accolades that ATI gets for dumping a bunch of specs on the web, Intel has put vastly more time & money into supporting OSS, but still gets labeled as "closed source" by fanboys.