Aug

5

Intel takes on AMD and Nvidia with new graphic chips Larrabee

Filed Under GPU and Gaming, Microprocessor 

Over the last two days, the PC industry was quite excited about Intel’s forthcoming high end discrete graphic chips, Larrabee, which are scheduled to launch some time in end of 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee is expected to compete head on with the GeForce and Radeon graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD, respectively (Ref). Remarkably, Intel builds up its graphic chip capability solely through its in-house development effort without acquiring the know how through acquisitions of other graphics companies. In comparison, AMD has obtained its graphics chip capabilities through the acquisition of ATI in 2006.

Compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon which use proprietary graphics-focused cores, Larrabee will use the popular x86 cores with x86 instruction sets, much like a mulit-core CPU. However, Larrabee’s cores will be much simpler than the Core 2 Duo’s cores. It is being designed explicitly for stream processing and rasterized 3D graphics (DirectX/OpenGL) for games. It is also capable of performing ray tracing and physics processing in real time. Another interesting fact is that the design of Larrabee was coming from Intel’s previous Pentium 4 design team (Ref).

You may call Larrabee a GPU, or a mutli-core CPU or whatever. But the truth is the difference between GPU and CPU is now blurring.

Related posts

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments

3 Responses to “Intel takes on AMD and Nvidia with new graphic chips Larrabee”

  1. AZZENo Gravatar on August 6th, 2008 2:14 am

    Adding more multi-core compute is not what we need.

    Current trends in microprocessor evolution indicate that more and more applications will become memory-bound and be unable to benefit from the ample compute resources offered by the next generation of computers.

    This increasing disparity between a system’s compute capabilities and the available memory bandwidth needed to fully utilize that compute is the real problem.

    Until the memory bandwidth issues are solved, adding more compute won’t make a dent at speeding up performance for applications like ray tracing - that’s the real bottleneck that needs to be addressed.

  2. where do you buy electronic cigarettes on September 8th, 2009 1:24 pm

    where do you buy electronic cigarettes…

    High price- due to taxes and otherwise- is the biggest factor that deters children from starting tobacco in the first place. Due to the state of the economy, we may see even more adults say enough is enough when it comes to tobacco as well. The only pr…

  3. BrendaNo Gravatar on May 6th, 2010 9:28 am

    stream sex

Leave a Reply