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Larrabee ISA Revealed
David Greene writes "Intel has released information on Larrabee's ISA. Far more than an instruction set for graphics, Larrabee's ISA provides x86 users with a vector architecture reminiscent of the top supercomputers of the late 1990s and early 2000s. '... Intel has also been applying additional transistors in a different way — by adding more cores. This approach has the great advantage that, given software that can parallelize across many such cores, performance can scale nearly linearly as more and more cores get packed onto chips in the future. Larrabee takes this approach to its logical conclusion, with lots of power-efficient in-order cores clocked at the power/performance sweet spot. Furthermore, these cores are optimized for running not single-threaded scalar code, but rather multiple threads of streaming vector code, with both the threads and the vector units further extending the benefits of parallelization.' Things are going to get interesting."
The story title conjured up images of the boxes of ISA cards I've still got sitting around. Ah, the joys of setting IRQs... good times.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
So that is where the term "EPIC FAIL" comes from...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It appears that this could well improve the speed of lots of different operations. A definite boon for graphics like operations, but also a lot of DSP (audio/maths)stuff can benefit from these enhancements. It would also appear that general code could easily be sped up, however, compiler writers need to get their collective arses into gear for this to happen.
Yeah, and while they are at it, I hope they finally get around to fixing that damn segfault bug. It's been around for YEARS.