Intel Larrabee has been talked about to such an extent since it was first announced, that some people might even be prompted to think that the chip is already available for purchase. Unfortunately, this is not the case and, unless Intel is actually planning to take us all by surprise, we will not get to see its upcoming graphics chip until sometime in 2009. But, before that happens, more details are emerging about a chip that, as Intel says, will put
NVIDIA's CUDA to genuine
shame.
The real buzz surrounding Intel's Larrabee has been going on since talks have begun about raytracing, a technology that isn't used by today's graphics cards. Some people suspected Intel was going to change the industry by introducing raytracing as a standard meant to replace raster graphics. Again, this seems to not be the case, since Larrabee will also rasterize pixels, just like current cards do.
What is really interesting is Intel's Larrabee technical numbers, which bring to light quite a few impressive details. The processing cores on the upcoming graphics chip will be based on the 13-year-old P54C architecture, which most of us know as the Pentium. This doesn't necessarily mean that Intel's processor will have anything to do with the old Pentium processors. In fact, the Larrabee Pentium might feature 64-bit operations and even achieve 2TFlops.
The first Larrabee technical specifications that have been leaked from Intel set the upcoming chip as capable of working at frequency levels that range from 1.7 to 2.5 GHz. The chip was said to sport 16-24 cores able of achieving 960GFlops double precision, while the current Radeon HD4870X2 can do 600GFlops in double precision and 24000 GFlops in single precision. The 2TFlops could be possible if Intel's Larrabee were to come equipped with 32 cores operating at 2.0GHz. But this will most likely be a server option.
According to the initial data, the Larrabee chip will have a die size of 49.5mm2, which is less than one tenth of the size of NVIDIA's G200 graphic monster.
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