With Larabee, Intel Plans an Encore... Leap of Faith

[alexxmidnite]

They're going to run into the same problems as IBM with Cell. Vectorizing your code base is no walk in the park and it's going to be difficult for developers who are used to working with only one or two general purpose cpus. I really don't see this taking over the traditional cpu/gpu paradigm anytime soon.

[walter0bz]

IMO not so.

cell's difficulties due to memory architecture

IMO larabee will be much easier to handle than gpgpu or cell

only issue is prevalence of gpus ?

[airraideagle]

Larrabee will be more graphics oriented than the current-gen CELLs. the current CELL was not as good at graphics as Sony & IBM hoped it would while developing it. That's why Sony had to turn to Nvidia for PS3's graphics. The CELL can only help with graphics not do the whole job. Larrabee will be able to do the whole job. That's why Sony is concidering it for PS4, and why some websites are reporting Intel won the graphics contract to put Larrabee in PS4.

[airraideagle]

IBM will only reach 1 TeraFlop in the next-gen 32 SPE CELL in 2010-2011. Intel will already be there in 2009-2010, at 1 TeraFlop and beyond with the first-gen Larrabee, nevermind Larrabee2 beyond 2010

[airraideagle]

Larrabee is going to offer 1 to 2 TeraFlops of compute performance in the first generation chips. whether that requires more than 16 cores (for 2 TeraFlops) remains to be seen, but it can be done.

The *current* CELL in PS3 can only manage 1/5 of a TeraFlop (218 GFLOPs), and the CELLs that run faster with all 8 SPEs working can still only do 1/4 of a TeraFlop.

[airraideagle]

Intel Larrabee is highly scalable. There can be 16 or 24 or 32 or 48 or perhaps even 64 cores on a single chip. It will also be possible to have 2 Larrabee chips/boards in one PC, much like today with Nvidia's SLI or AMD/ATI's CrossFire.

Intel has also posted for jobs for people to work on Larrabee 2 (a next-next gen architecture).

[fazares]

ahaha....order of magnitude better....a whole generation beyond...ur talking of a gpu like featuring 1.9 billion transistors(a small workstation basically)...the whole ps3(cell+rsx)is just little over 300 millions transistors..the ps4 will probably have an even more powerful gpu...

[airraideagle]

No, the whole PS3 is over 500 million transistors.

CELL - 235M

RSX - 300M

total 535M

[jabjab12]

Compare it with the xbox and ps3's cell processor - better and if so - how much better !!!