March 7, 2007, 9:45 AM by bfun
I've heard rumors of this but I thought they would be integrating it into the motherboards. Are they making a PCI-e card for 08 and 09? I guess the CPU integration will be a good idea for mainstream PC users but I have to wonder how economical this will be for people who like to upgrade a lot. I guess it could be a real boon for the PC game market if every new PC can play high end games.

April 17, 2007, 7:26 AM by chairmansteve
Larrabee is not only for graphics/visualization.

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Gelsinger said that Intel has begun planning products based on a highly parallel, IA-based programmable architecture codenamed "Larrabee." It will be easily programmable using many existing software tools, and designed to scale to trillions of floating point operations per second (Teraflops) of performance. The Larrabee architecture will include enhancements to accelerate applications such as scientific computing, recognition, mining, synthesis, visualization, financial analytics and health applications.

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http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070416comp_b.htm

April 18, 2007, 12:25 AM by Sirius_Grey to chairmansteve
This is awesome. Finally they will parallelize other aspects of computing and not just the graphic pipeline. I can't wait. And if it is integrated into the motherboard, that would be nice too. As bfun said, every PC will have such performance out of the box.

I personally thought that this strategy was what AMD and ATI were going for when they merged. Intel is beating them to it. Soon the CPU will do all of the work that was offload to the GPU, PhysicsPU, AIPU and do it easily.

But how much is this monster going to cost?

April 18, 2007, 2:19 AM by chairmansteve to Sirius_Grey
Cost? There may be multiple products with integrated graphics at the lowest end and multiple (e.g. dual, quad) PCI Express cards at the highest end.

September 18, 2007, 5:56 PM by chairmansteve
At IDF it was confirmed that Larrabee will be a discrete GPU for "high-end" graphics. The processor should also handle physics acceleration. Expect the Havok physics engine (now owned by Intel) to be optimized for Larrabee.

The plan is to have 45nm Larrabee in 2009, a 32nm update in 2010 with more cores, and a new GPU architecture in 2011.

January 18, 2008, 5:09 PM by chairmansteve
Paul Otellini thinks Larrabee is on track for late 2009 or 2010. And it looks like Intel will be touting real-time ray-tracing around the same time.

January 18, 2008, 7:58 PM by Airzonk to chairmansteve
When Real-time Raytracing is reality, we'll be in for some bitchin graphics in games. I've been dreaming of Real-time Raytracing for years. I can't believe we're almost there.

August 4, 2008, 10:46 AM by chairmansteve
A few more Larrabee details were released.

Each core is based on the old Pentium from the 90s. Intel added 512-bit vector processing, 4-way multi-threading, 64-bit extensions, pre-fetching, and L2 cache. And there are 8 to 48 of those cores packed in a single chip with a 1024-bit ring bus.

As expected, the texture sampler uses fixed-function hardware.

The software renderer is tile based like PowerVR. Intel is calling it binned rendering.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2327045,00.asp
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=602
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10005391-64.html

December 5, 2009, 1:32 AM by bfun
Looks like it's mostly dead.

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“Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,” said Nick Knuppfler, a spokesman for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. “Larrabee will not be a consumer product.”

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http://venturebeat.com/2009/12/04/intel-cancels-larrabee-consumer-graphics-chip/