Intel Larrabee [speculation] to offer 16x the performance of GeForce8800 ? - Intel, Nvidia partnership to give Larrabee hardware rasterizingcapability? Larrabee could be useful for games

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4605

From our non-Intel sources, we came to know about Intel's Visual
Computing Group (VCG) discrete graphics plans. There seems to be a few
interesting developments down the pipeline that could prove quite a
challenge to NVIDIA and AMD in 2 years time. As already stated on
their website, the group is focused on developing advanced products
based on a many-core architecture targeting high-end client platforms
initially. Their first flagship product for games and graphics
intensive applications is likely to happen in late 2008-09 timeframe
and the GPU is based on multi-core architecture. We heard there could
be as many as 16 graphics cores packed into a single die.

The process technology we speculate for such product is probably at
32nm judging from the timeframe. Intel clearly has the advantage of
their advanced process technology since they are always at least one
node ahead of their competitors and they are good in tweaking for
better yield. Intel is likely use back their CPU naming convention on
GPU so you could probably guess that the highest end could be called
Extreme Edition and there should be mainstream and value editions. The
performance? How about 16x performance of any fastest graphics card
out there now [referring to G80] as claimed. Anyway it is hard to
speculate who will lead by then as it will be DX10.1/11 era with
NVIDIA G9x and ATi R7xx around.






http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/242


Larrabee: 16 Cores, 2GHz, 150W, and more...

It is amazing how much information is out there in the wild, when you
know where to look. TG Daily has just published an article partially
based on a presentation they were tipped off about, and which was
uploaded on the 26th of April. It reveals a substantial amount of new
information, which we will not focus on analysing right now, so we do
encourage you to read it for yourself.

Page 1 discusses the possibility that Larrabee is a joint effort
between NVIDIA and Intel, which we find unlikely, and is possibly just
a misinterpretation of the recently announced patent licensing
agreement between the two companies. Page 2 is much more interesting
however, as they link to the presentation above and also uncover the
hidden Larrabee PCB diagram on slide 16.

We would tend not to agree with most of the analysis and speculation
provided by TG Daily, but it's still worth a good read along with the
presentation, which we are very glad they uncovered. Especially
interesting are slides 16, 17, 19, 24 and 31. That last one includes
some very interesting and previously unknown information on Intel's
upcoming Gesher CPU architecture (aka Sandy Bridge), which is aimed at
the 32nm node in the 2010 timeframe. Larrabee, on the other hand, will
presumably be manufactured on Intel's 45nm process but sport a larger
die size.


http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32282/137/


Intel set to announce graphics partnership with Nvidia?

By Wolfgang Gruener, Darren Polkowski


Chicago (IL) - Intel may soon be announcing a close relationship with
Nvidia, which apparently will be contributing to the company's
Larrabee project, TG Daily has learned. Larrabee is expected to roll
out in 2009 and debut as a floating point accelerator product with a
performance of more than 1 TFlops as well as a high-end graphics card
with dual-graphics capabilities.

Rumors about Intel's Larrabee processor have been floating around for
more than a year. Especially since the product's official announcement
at this year's spring IDF and an accelerating interest in floating
point accelerators, the topic itself and surrounding rumors are
gaining traction every day.

Industry sources told TG Daily that Intel is preparing a "big"
announcement involving technologies that will be key to develop
Larrabee. And at least some of those technologies may actually be
coming from Nvidia, we hear: Our sources described Larrabee as a
"joint effort" between the two companies, which may expand over time.
A scenario in which Intel may work with Nvidia to develop Intel-
tailored discrete graphics solutions is speculation but is considered
to be a likely relationship between the two companies down the road.
Clearly, Intel and Nvidia are thinking well beyond their cross-
licensing agreements that are in place today.

It is unclear when the collaboration will be announced; however,
details could surface as early as June 26, when the International
Supercomputing Conference 2007 will open its doors in Dresden,
Germany.

Asked about a possible announcement with Intel, Nvidia spokesperson
Ken Brown provided us with a brief statement: "We enjoy a good working
relationship with Intel and have agreements and ongoing engineering
activities as a result. This said, we cannot comment further about
items that are covered by confidentiality agreements between Intel and
Nvidia."

Intel replied to our inquiry by saying that the company does "not
comment on rumors and speculation."



The AMD-ATI and Intel-Nvidia thingy

In the light of the AMD-ATI merger, it is only to be expected that the
relationship between Intel and Nvidia is examined on an ongoing basis.
So, what does a closer relationship between Intel and Nvidia mean?

The combination with ATI enabled AMD to grow into a different class of
company. It evolved from being CPU-focused into a platform company
that not only can match some key technologies of Intel, but at least
for now has an edge in areas such as visualization capabilities. At a
recent press briefing, the company showed off some of its ideas and it
was clear to us that especially the area of general purpose GPUs will
pave the way to a whole new world of enterprise and desktop
computing.

Nvidia is taking a similar approach with its CUDA software interface,
which allows developers to take advantage of the (general purpose)
floating point horsepower of Geforce 8 graphics processors - more than
500 GFlops per chip. Intel's Larrabee processor is also aimed at
applications that benefit from floating point acceleration - such as
physics, enhanced AI and ray tracing.

While it has been speculated that Intel may be creating Larrabee with
an IA CPU architecture, we were told there may be more GPU elements in
this processor than we previously had thought. A Larrabee card with a
(general purpose) graphics processing unit will support CPUs in
applications that at least partially benefit from massively parallel
processing (as opposed to the traditional sequential processing); in
gaming, the Larrabee processor can be used for physics processing, for
example.

An imminent collaboration announcement between Intel and Nvidia, which
reminds us of a recent Digitimes story that claimed Nvidia was trading
technologies with Intel, of course, raises the question how close the
relationship between Intel and Nvidia might be. It also raises the
question, once again, if Intel may actually be interested in buying
Nvidia - which could make a whole lot of sense for Intel, but appears
to be rather unlikely at this time. Nvidia could cost Intel more than
$15 billion, given the firm's current market cap of $12.6 billion, and
the talk in Silicon Valley indicates that Nvidia co-founder and CEO
Jen-Hsun Huang isn't really interested in selling the company.

But a deal with Intel, involving the licensing of technologies or even
supply of GPUs could have a huge impact on Nvidia's bottom line and
catapult the company into a new phase of growth. However, a closer
collaboration could be important for Intel as well: AMD's acquisition
of ATI was not a measure to raise the stakes in the graphics market or
to battle Nvidia; it was a move to compete in the future CPU market -
with Intel. Having Nvidia on board provides Intel with a graphics
advantage, at least from today's point of view, and could allow the
company to more easily access advanced graphics technology down the
road.



What we know about Larrabee

Intel has recently shared more information with the public about its
intents in the realm of general purpose GPU (GPGPU). In a presentation
from March 7 of this year, Intel discussed its data parallelism
programming implementation called Ct. The presentation discusses the
use of flat vectors and very large instruction words (VLIW as utilized
in ATI/AMD's R600). In essence, the Ct application programming
language (API) bridges the gap of allowing it to work with existing
legacy APIs and libraries as well as co-exist with current
multiprocessing APIs (Pthreads and OpenMP), yet provides "extended
functionality to address irregular algorithms."

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/storie...abee_board.gif

There are several things to point out from the image above, which is a
block diagram of a board utilizing Larrabee. First is the PCIe 2.0
interface with the system. Intel is currently testing PCIe 2.0 as part
of the Bearlake-X (Beachwood) chipset (commercial name: X38), which
could be coming out as part of the Wolfdale 45 nm processor rollout
late this year or early in 2008. Larrabee won't arrive until 2009, but
our sources indicate that if you buy an X38-based board, you will be
able to run a Larrabee board in such a system.

In the upper right hand corner the power connections indicate 150
watts and 75 watts. These correspond to 8-pin and 6-pin power
connections that we have seen on the recent ATI HD2900XT. Intel
expects the power consumption of such a board to be higher than 150
watts. There are video outputs to the far left and as well as video
in. Larrabee appears to have VIVO functionality as well as HDMI output
based on the audio-in block seen at the top left.
A set of BSI connections are next to the audio in connection. We are
not positive on what the abbreviation stands for but we speculate that
these are connections for using these cards in parallel like ATI's
Crossfire or Nvidia's SLI technologies. Finally, there is the size of
the processor (package). That is over twice the size of current GPUs
as ATI's R600 is roughly 21 mm by 20 mm (420 mm=B2). Intel describes
the
chip as a "discrete high end GPU" on a general purpose platform, using
at least 16 cores and providing a "fully programmable performance of 1
TFlops."

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/storie.../larrabee1.gif


Moving on we can see that Larrabee will be based on a multi-SIMD
configuration. From other discussions about the chip across the net,
it would seem that each is scalar that works using Vec16 instructions.
That would mean that, for graphics applications, it could work on
blocks of 2x2 pixels at a time. These "in-Order" execution SIMDs will
have floating point 16 (FP16) precision as outlined by IEEE754. Also
to note is the use of a ring memory architecture. From a presentation
by Intel Chief Architect Ed Davis called "tera Tera Tera", Davis
outlines that the internal bandwidth on the bus will be 256 B/cycle
and the external memory will have a bandwidth of 128 GB/s. This is
extremely fast and achievable based on the 1.7-2.5 GHz projections for
the core frequency. Attached to each core will be some form of
texturing unit as well as a dynamically partitioned cache and ring
stop on the memory ring.

In the final image below you will notice that each device will have a
17 GB/s of bandwidth per link. These links tie into a next generation
Southbridge titled "ICH-n" as this is yet to be determined. From
discussions with those in the industry, it would appear that the
external memory might not be soldered into the board but in fact be
plug in modules. The slide denotes DDR3, GDDR, as well as FBD or fully
buffered DIMMs. It will be interesting to see what form this will
actually be implemented as but that is the fun of speculation.

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/storie.../larrabee3.jpg


The current layout of project Larrabee is a deviation of previous
Intel roadmap targets. In a 2005 whitepaper entitled "Platform 2015:
Intel Processor and Platform Evolution for the Next Decade", the
company outlines a series of Xscale processors based on Explicitly
Parallel Instruction Computing or EPIC. Intel has deviated slightly
from its initial roadmap since the release of this paper: Intel sold
Xscale to Marvell last year, which makes it a rather unlikely product
for Larrabee - and could have opened up the discussion for other
processing units.

What is interesting is that rumors that Intel was looking for talent
for an upcoming "project" involving graphics started passing around
already more than a year and a half ago. In August of last year, you
could apply for positions on Career Builder and Intel's own website. A
current generic job description exists on Intel's website.



Concluding note

While this is an interesting approach to graphics, physics, and
general purpose processing, we will be seeing the meat in the final
product as well as the success of acceptance with independent software
vendors (ISVs). In our opinion, the concept of the GPGPU is the most
significant development in the computer environment in at least 15
years. The topic has been gaining ground lately and this new
implementation from Intel could take things to a whole new level. As
for the graphics performance, only time will tell.

It will be interesting to see which role Nvidia will play in Intel's
strategy. Keep a close eye on this one.