14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, Intel disclosed the fact that the development of its Larrabee chip with integrated graphics circuits had failed to progress at the intended pace. Intel, as is the case with such announcements, did not give any specific reasons for the delay, nor did it estimate just how much longer the chip would take to complete. The announcement seemed to suggest, however, that the main reason was the Larrabee's likely inability to compete against NVIDIA's well-established graphics and AMD's 3-teraflops GPUs, at least on the high-end market.
As a response to a query set by Tom's Hardware, Advanced Micro Devices gave its take on the recent developments and compared its own research efforts with Intel's. Apparently, AMD seemed to give off the impression that it saw logic in Intel's attempts to integrate graphics into its CPUs, as this was somewhat similar to what Fusion did, but that the Santa Clara-based chip maker was going about it all wrong.
"It really comes down to design philosophy," Dave Erskine, graphics public relations of AMD, said."GPUs are hard to design and you can’t design one with a CPU-centric approach that utilizes existing x86 cores."
"From the outset, we have seen Larrabee as further validation of the importance of visual computing. We continue to assert that GPU technology is essential to the computing experience, today and tomorrow," Erskine added. "AMD is the technology leader in GPU technology for 3D graphics, video and GPU Compute."
As opposed to AMD's Fusion, which combines a central processor and a graphics processing unit into a single chip, Intel's Larrabee was supposed to be closer to a GPGPU, with both computing and graphics capabilities based on the x86 design. Already, end-users were quite aware of the fact that Intel's chip had graphics capabilities suited for the mid-range market at best, with performances similar to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285.
AMD took the opportunity to again explain its unique and favorable position. The company is, currently, the only one that has both CPU and GPU technology to merge together. The developer said that it could more easily respond to the needs of the market because it had a wider range of products.
"With only CPU, or GPU, a company is limited in its ability to respond to the needs of the industry," Erskine shared. "AMD is the only company in command of both GPU and CPU IP portfolios, and in response to the clear direction of the computer industry we’re bringing CPU and GPU together in Fusion."
AMD's Fusion has seen its own string of delays, though. The project started years ago and was restarted several times, each time because the developers decided to move on to new manufacturing processes. The current process that Fusion is being built upon is the 32nm, and the technology is expected to see the light of day in 2011. Dave Erskine did, however, speak of another one of the company's initiatives.
"We’re entering a new era in PC computing and it requires that visual computing technologies drive the pace of innovation. We call this Velocity. AMD Velocity builds on our already established GPU design cycle to achieve a faster pace of innovation than AMD previously achieved with a CPU-only development focus." Erskine explained. "AMD velocity is designed to deliver performance breakthroughs via teraFLOPS-class GPU compute power in tandem with performance and low-power x86 core options. We expect this will result in a clear, compelling platform differentiation for AMD, and the delivery of the best APU on the market every year."
Regardless of AMD's current plans, the development issues surrounding Larrabee will prolong the company's status as a sole developer of both CPUs and GPUs.