Intel Larrabee has been a real buzz around the web. It all started with Intel talking a lot about raytracing and how Larrabee and it’s x86 architecture would be perfect for that. John Carmack joined in and ID Software even developed a raytraced version of Quake 4 for Intel to show off, not on Larrabee though. Four Intel Core 2 Extreme processors was barely capable of reaching playable performance, but with Larrabee things would be different they claimed.
This continued and many thought that Intel Larrabee would force developers into raytracing, perhaps due to the lack of talk about raster graphics with Larrabee. Larrabee will rasterize pixels just fine though. There’s no forcing of anything with Larrabee by Intel. In 2006, some highly preliminary specifications and technical data leaked from Intel.
Since Larrabee was slated for late 2009 by then, and still is, these numbers felt anything but firm. In any case, they said that Larrabee would operate at 1.7-2.5GHz, sport 16-24 in-order cores capable of up to 960GFLOPS double precision. Radeon HD 4870X2 can do 600GFLOPS in double precision, 2400GLOPS in single precision. According to information posted by Heise, Larrabee with 32 cores operating at 2.0GHz should be capable of reaching 2TFLOPS, unfortunately it doesn’t say single or double precision.
It goes on to reveal that the cores are in fact based on the more than 13 year old P54C architecture, known as the original Pentium among the mortals. Even though it’s based on the P54C architecture it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will find many things in common with the Pentium processor and the upcoming graphics processing unit. The P54C has been shrunk to 45nm, been extended and updated to, for example, feature more cache and updated instructions. Larrabee will also feature 64-bit operations, which makes us believe that the mentioned 2TFLOPS might very well be double precision.
As we’ve reported in the past, the 32 core version is most likely a server option, while the the 16 and 24 core versions are more likely to go retail sometime in 2010. Intel aims to design the card so that it will fit within current PCIe power specifications, which means a maximum of 300W, a bit less hopefully. The scariest part is the die size though, initial data stated a die size of 49.5mm2. That’s less than one tenth of the size of NVIDIA G200. Now that GDDR5 has arrived, we can also conclude that it’s not unfeasible to believe that Larrabee will use that.
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