Intel revealed details Monday about its upcoming family of graphics processors with multiple cores, code-named Larrabee. The new processors are expected to compete with market leaders NVIDIA and AMD’s ATI division.
Details unveiled in an Intel-authored paper include a new approach to rendering 3-D, a programming model and performance analysis for several applications, and multiple processor engines. Intel plans to present its plan at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 12.
The first Larrabee-based product will target the personal-computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel architecture, which means it will be based on an array of many processors. The individual processors are similar to the Intel processors that power the Internet, laptops, PCs and servers, the company said.
“Intel is not the first vendor to go down this road. IBM’s Power-based Cell processor, and actually the multicore chips that IBM built for Microsoft’s XBox and Nintendo, were the first,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research. “IBM’s work in the multicore space effectively knocked Intel out of the computer game-console market.”
Hundred-Core Processors
First or not, Intel expects Larrabee to kick-start an industrywide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers. Intel said it has a number of internal teams, projects and software-related efforts under way to speed the transition, but its Tera-Scale Computing research program has been its largest. Intel said it has partnered with more than 400 universities, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and companies such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.
“Over time, the consistency of Intel architecture and thus developer freedom afforded by the Larrabee architecture will bring about massive innovation in many areas and market segments,” Intel said Monday.
As an example, Intel pointed to how…