Intel is to release in 2009 or 2010 a first wave of Larrabee chips with 16 to 48 cores and tailored for handling computer game graphics.
Microsoft and Intel have software research alliances with major universities and Intel is also working with the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Intel researchers have already made an 80-core processor. “We’re quickly moving the computing industry to a many-core world,” Intel Research director Andrew Chien said at the alliance launch. [1]
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. [2]
The following information comes from the paper [3]:
- Larrabee uses multiple in-order x86 CPU cores that are augmented by a wide vector processor unit, as well as some fixed function logic blocks. This provides dramatically higher performance per watt and per unit of area than out-of-order CPUs on highly parallel workloads.
- A coherent on-die 2nd level cache allows efficient inter-processor communication and high-bandwidth local data access by CPU cores.
- Task scheduling is performed entirely with software in Larrabee, rather than in fixed function logic.
- Larrabee uses a 1024-bits wide bi-directional ring network to allow agents such as CPU cores, L2 caches and other logic blocks to communicate with each other within the chip. Each ring data-path is 512-bits wide per direction.
- Larrabee provides excellent support for high throughput applications that use irregular data structures such as complex pointer trees, spatial data structures, or large sparse n-dimensional matrices.
References
[1] Yahoo News(2008). Intel reveals design for fast, efficient future chips. [Online] Available here.
[2] Intel Corporation(Aug 4, 2008). First Details on a Future Intel Design Codenamed ‘Larrabee’. Press Release [Online] Available here.
[3] Seiler, L., Carmean, D., Sprangle, E., Forsyth, T., Abrash, M., Dubey, P., Junkins, S., Lake, A., Sugerman, J., Cavin, R., Espasa, R., Grochowski, E., Juan, T., and Hanrahan, P. 2008. Larrabee: a many-core x86 architecture for visual computing. ACM Trans. Graph. 27, 3 (Aug. 2008), 1-15. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1360612.1360617
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