larrabee

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.

During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.

And Nvidia and AMD will no doubt be … Read more

Behind the release this week of Intel graphics software looms Larrabee, Intel's future graphics chip.

First, the news. Intel announced the release of Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA), a suite of software tools that enables PC game developers to analyze and optimize game performance on Intel Integrated Graphics. This is part of the Visual Adrenaline program, launched at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in August, which provides tools, resources and information for game developers, artists, and animators, according to Intel.

But let's be clear about one thing: not a lot of people in gaming circles are … Read more

Don't get me wrong-- I think the Intel-TSMC alliance announced earlier this week is a good thing for both companies.

But the official explanation, that Intel wants TSMC's help to make Atom processor cores more widely available to the industry, just doesn't strike me as a sufficient reason for the deal.

Intel hardly needs TSMC's help to make SoCs (systems on a chip). Intel has been making highly integrated devices for the embedded market, as well as PC chipsets for a long time. It already has enough of the building blocks and enough experienced engineers to … Read more

As Intel took its case against Nvidia to court, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang could not resist making the oft-repeated assertion that the GPU is in, and CPU is out--a thinly veiled reference to the graphics chip maker's credo that PC processor mind share is shifting from Intel to Nvidia.

Here is the statement that Huang inserted into the Thursday Nvidia release about the Intel court filing. "At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course, and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to … Read more

Here's the silicon scuttlebutt of the weekend, if not the week: Sony will use Intel's Larrabee graphics chip in its upcoming PlayStation 4. (Let's not forget the other tantalizing piece of speculation this week: the Nvidia-powered Microsoft smartphone rumor, which Microsoft apparently put to rest.)

We know for a fact that Jeffery Katzenberg at DreamWorks likes Larrabee--a lot. That apparently was one of the reasons DreamWorks dropped Advanced Micro Devices.

So, chalk that up as one big win for Intel's somewhat-murky next-generation graphics chip due late this year or 2010. Now Sony? A report this week in the U.K.-based technology Web site The Inquirer … Read more

Intel and DreamWorks plan to show off the fruits of their 3D collaboration in a Super Bowl 3D extravaganza this Sunday as DreamWorks prepares to tap into future Intel Larrabee graphics silicon.

The Super Bowl ad sponsored by DreamWorks Animation, Intel, and NBC will feature a 3D trailer of the animated movie Monsters vs. Aliens, coming out in March. A second spot will be a 3D commercial for PepsiCo's SoBe LifeWater energy drinks. Viewers--as they will in the movie theater--will need special 3D glasses to see the effects. (Intel has made 125 million of the InTru3D glasses, which are … Read more

Not so fast. That's the gist of a report that says Intel's future graphics chip will face a grueling battle to gain ground against entrenched and very capable competitors.

When Larrabee was disclosed in August, it sent shockwaves through the chip industry. After all, this was Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, announcing its intention to assail one of the last major PC chip markets it has yet to dominate: standalone "discrete" graphics processors--or GPUs. Larrabee is due to ship in the 2009-2010 time frame.

Intel already dominates the market for integrated graphics silicon: graphics functions … Read more

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that… Read more

Intel announced on Monday that it will be presenting a paper at Siggraph 2008 about its "many-core" Larrabee architecture, which will be the basis of future Intel graphics processors.

The paper itself, however, has already been published, and I was able to get a copy of it. (Unfortunately, as you'll see at that link, the paper is normally available only to members of the Association for Computing Machinery.)

The paper is a pretty thorough summary of Intel's motives for developing Larrabee and the major features of the new architecture. Basically, Larrabee is about using many simple x86 cores--more than you'd see in the central processor (CPU) of the system--to implement a graphics processor (GPU). This concept has received a lot of attention since Intel first started talking about it last year.

… Read more