The Intel Investor Meeting revealed plenty of details on Intel’s upcoming products, but the most interesting bits came when Eric Mentzer, Vice President and General Manager Graphics Development Group, took the podium. He was basically saying that Intel intends to increase it’s already large share of the graphics market, not only by improving the performance of its integrated circuits, but also by introducing the high-end solution also known as Larabee.
The performance of integrated chips are expected to increase by quite a margin, partly due to the fact that Intel will “soon” unveil a CPU-GPU hybrid processor. Soon is when the Nehalem-based processor Havendale is launched, which is slated for early 2009. Intel expects integrated GPUs to be six times faster in 2009 than today’s i965G chipset. According to Intel, this still will not be enough for gaming
Already in Q2, we should see the arrival of the G45 and G43 chipsets, which sport the new GMA X4500HD graphics chip. An IGP which is expected to be 70% faster than the predecessor X3500. It also supports the latest connectivity in the form of HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI. Hardware acceleration of HD media is of course also available with the chip.
The first Larabee chip is expected to appear before the end of the year, although mass production and public availability is still in the 2009-2010 zone. TDP is expected to be in the range of 150W as the processor will be made with Intel’s 45nm node.
Larabee is a bit different from today’s modern GPUs. While they are also highly parallelized structures, they are not as CPU-like as Larabee is. Larabee will feature something in the range of 16-24 cores operating at 1.75-2.5GHz, with 32KB L1 cache per core and a shared 4-6MB L2 cache. This is all very preliminary, and the final specifications are far from set.
The cores will be connected in a ring bus not entirely unlike the one used by the Cell Broadband Engine inside of the PlayStation 3.
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