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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.'"
Good, learn from that and don't make that same mistake again!
Larrabee [...] will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI.'
DOH!
Belief is the currency of delusion.
So why is NVIDIA on the defensive?
Intel is aiming at number crunchers (note that their chip uses doubles, not floats). They don't want NVIDIA to steal that market with CUDA.
When Intel says "graphics", they mean movie studios, etc.
If Larrabee eventually turns into a competitor for NVIDIA, all well and good, but that's not their goal at the moment.
No sig today...
At least Intel documents their hardware. Fuck NVIDIA and their stupid proprietary hardware!
Glass
Ten years ago you would see Nvidia GPUs in everything from low- to high-end. Today, not so much - Intel dominates the low-end spectrum, with ATI hanging onto a somewhat insignificant market share. The Larrabee is Intel moving upmarket. Sure, it might not perform as well the latest Nvidia or ATI high-end GPU but it might be enough in terms of performance or have other benefits (better OSS support) to win some of Nvidia's current market share over. Considering it's supposedly the Pentium architecture recycled, it's also reasonable to assume the design will be relatively cost-effective and allow Intel to sell at very competitive prices while still maintaining healthy profit margins.
It's a classic case of disruption. Intel enters and Nvidia is happy to leave because there's a segment above that's much more attractive to pursue. Continue along the same lines until there's nowhere for Nvidia to run, at which point the game ends - circle of disruption complete. See also Silicon Graphics, Nvidia's predecessor in many ways.
If, in the future, the trend evolves that all gpu's are integrated.
Intel, nvidia, AMD and ATI...
Who is the odd one out there?
I record my sleeptalking
but the extra programability larrabee have as its just a bunch of cpus with some gpu instructions
Agreed -- why stick to GPU applications, when you have a general purpose multicore machine? How about getting those new instructions into general usage -- remember how MMX was originally introduced for stuff we now run on GPUs.
As for traditional GPU applications, there's already an OpenGL driver for the Cell SPUs in development. A similar driver for a generic multicore machine would be nice, particularly if it's not limited to Larrabee and x86. Of course we already have software implementations of OpenGL, but I wonder how well those scale with dozens of CPUs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I think Fusion is an alternative to current integrated graphics, not to separate high-performance GPUs. After all it shares the drawback of having to steal bandwidth from the regular RAM, where discrete graphics cards have their own memory.
For a moderately power-hungry graphics chip (think 20 watt) the advantage is that Fusion can share the CPU cooler with a moderately power-hungry CPU, while integrating the GPU elsewhere on the board will require a separate cooler. That takes extra board area and money.
So I think Fusion might be able to perform somewhat better for the same price than other integrated graphics. Which means it threatens the widely used Intel boards with integrated graphics rather than NVidia.
To mention something else (but still mostly on topic):
In the Linux market, AMD is currently building a lot of goodwill by providing documentation and Open Source driver code. That might become an advantage over NVidia too.
C - the footgun of programming languages
As Moore's law makes silicon cheaper, what are you going to do with it? more cache, more cores... why not a GPU? Concurrent software to utilize multi-cores is not yet mainstream (maybe never), so that leaves cache and GPU.
In a way, the existence of separate GPUs is just a sign that the CPU wasn't powerful enough to deliver the graphics the market wanted (and would pay for). When CPU's are powerful enough (clock speed or multi-core), they'll subsume the GPU, as they did maths co-processors and cache. ie. The silicon would be partitioned into CPU, GPU and cache - but it would all be on the one chip (called the "CPU" no doubt).
Intel already owns a fair bit of the integrated graphics market. They have great access to channels. Even if this is only half as good as a separate GPU, they will increase market share. I can't see what could stop them... except maybe a patented technology that can't be worked around. Some manufacturers of separate GPU's will survive in specialized niches. Some.
What chips? Intel hasn't demonstrated any Larrabee hardware yet. They've published some specs, but we don't even know how many cores it will have or their clock speed.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Two problems there; firstly Larrabee will probably run closer to 1.5-2 GHz. Right now many GPUs run in the <1 GHz range, believe it or not. Secondly, performance may not scale linearly with GHz; other bottlenecks like memory bandwidth might get in the way.
I do agree that the potential for flexibility in the software rendering is very exciting, but Intel will have trouble getting people to write custom code to take full advantage of it. What Larrabee really needs is to be in XBox 720 or PS4. In that situation people could go crazy writing totally custom renderers and it could really change how graphics is done.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Shouldn't that be four Cortext A9 chips, on the grounds that A9 has SMP support but not A8?
That said ... the reason the ARM market is so big is that it goes after a lower power market,
with cell phones and other battery powered gadgets being the canonical example. That market
has not yet felt a real need for SMP. So even if such an NVidia chip gets off the ground, it's
unclear how much it would sell.
The first widely available ARM Cortex chips are TI's OMAP3 family ... as seen in the
Beagleboard and, possibly more relevant in this
context, the open source Pandora gaming thingie. NVidia? Haven't really heard of them in these contexts,
though maybe it's just their usual closed-source mindset.