NVIDIA Talks of Larrabee Ahead of NVISION

Today is the first day of NVIDIA's NVISION 08 show, held in San Jose, California. As we mentioned in several of our previous articles, it is here that NVIDIA is expected to release a number of new products, and to discuss future technologies and projects. With AMD's graphics subsidiary, ATI, reclaiming the high-performance crown from NVIDIA, the green company is believed to announce a new GT200 card that will presumably be capable of competing with ATI's dual-chip Radeon HD 4870 X2.

However, until such a product is announced or released, all signs point to NVIDIA also being concerned about Intel's highly debated Larrabee chip, which will drop on the market in late 2009 or early 2010. Or, at least, that's what we could infer from the words of Andy Keane, general manager of NVIDIA's GPU computing group, who spoke with various reporters at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, just before the NVISION event kicked off.

"There's an incredible amount about Larrabee that's undefined," explained Keane, commenting on the specifications released so far. "You can't just say 'it's x86 so it's going to solve the massively parallel computing problem'."

Keane isn't the only NVIDIA rep that has offered an opinion on Intel's yet to be released Larrabee graphics chip. John Mottram, chief architect of the company's GT200 core, also made some statements regarding Intel's project.

"They've put out a certain amount of technical disclosure in the past five weeks," he noted, "but although they make Larrabee sound like it's a fundamentally better approach, it isn't. They don't tell you the assumptions they made. They talk about scaling, but they disregard memory bandwidth. They make it sound good, but we say, you neglected half a dozen things."

Mottram also quoted blogger and CPU architect Peter Glaskowsky who said that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Regarding NVIDIA's current main competitor, ATI, John Mottram admitted that his company had underestimated ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2. However, the Santa Clara-based chip maker's main focus remains getting back in the game and providing users with improved products.