Intel's future graphics chip adding a new vector

Intel released a few incremental details about its future graphics chip on Monday, but left a lot of unanswered questions about the company's push into uncharted waters.

Larrabee, a "many-core" graphics processor scheduled for 2009 or 2010, will come with a brand-new set of vector-processing instructions as part of its design, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group. Vector-processing instructions are used to improve the performance of graphics and video applications; you may have heard of previous vector-processing implementations such as SSE4.

Meet Intel's Larrabee, the company's future stab at entering into the graphics market.

(Credit: Intel)

These new instructions, combined with Larrabee's compatibility with the x86 instruction set, will make life easier for software developers, according to Gelsinger. In addition to regular graphics tasks currently dominated by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, Intel wants Larrabee to be able to take on a wider variety of tasks.

This is an emerging area of PC chip development--designing PC chips that use the best parts of graphics chips to improve performance. It's referred to by several names, with perhaps the most common label "GPGPU," or general-purpose graphics processing unit.

High-performance graphics chips are generally designed to do one thing, and do it fast. They aren't designed to handle the wide variety of workloads that PC chips tackle every day. As it becomes possible to add more and more cores to an individual chip, however, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia are investigating ways to build developer-friendly versions of graphics chips that can take on wider varieties of workloads.

The trouble is that "developer-friendly" line. Some of the current approaches for GPGPUs involve learning specialized programming techniques that are applicable just to that chip, and many of those are still very, very new compared with the 30-plus years of experience that people have had developing for the x86 instruction set.

"Attempts to create new programmable architectures are painful heavy-lifting over time, and for the most part they fail," said Gelsinger. And he should know: Intel's last attempt to create a new programmable architecture with the Itanium processor's EPIC instruction set hasn't come close to what Intel had once hoped to accomplish. Itanium hasn't been an abject failure, since people are buying the chips and development continues, but it's quite clear that Itanium is not, and will not be, the future of computing.

So this is Intel's pitch: it wants to get in on the graphics/multimedia game, since PC workloads are expected to head more and more in that direction. But it wants Larrabee to be like the release of a new Core 2 Duo processor: you'll have to learn how to use the new vector instructions to unlock the new performance, in the same manner you'd have to learn the new SSE4 instructions introduced last year with the Penryn chips, but you won't have to otherwise reinvent the wheel. Larrabee will also support familiar APIs (application programming interfaces) like DirectX and OpenGL, Gelsinger confirmed.

Intel's Pat Gelsinger, head of the company's digital enterprise group, takes questions about Larrabee.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

All told, we still don't know a hell of a lot about Larrabee. Gelsinger claims that big software development houses are excited about what they've seen so far from the project, but he did not offer any specific examples. The water-cooler conversation after his talk suggested that PC gaming companies will like this idea of a high-performance "many-core" (think more than eight) processor that's easier to program than IBM's Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3, for example.

But software developers have only heard of Larrabee as a concept; they haven't actually played with it yet. Intel hopes to have demonstration chips out later this year, with an actual launch not scheduled until either 2009 or 2010. We won't know just how easy programming for Larrabee will be until those demonstration chips are released.

Along a similar vector (nothing better than CPU puns), Intel disclosed that its "Sandy Bridge" processor, which is going to be a 2010 product, will also use a set of vector-processing instructions that the company is calling AVX. Gelsinger called AVX "SSE on steroids," suggesting that chip will take a big leap forward in graphics/multimedia performance.

Gelsinger spent the remainder of his address talking up Nehalem, which is due to arrive this year. Nehalem is going to be a hodge-podge of chips, with two, four, and eight core models scheduled to be in production later this year. They'll also use integrated memory controllers and point-to-point interconnects for speeding up the connections to memory and to other cores, respectively. Those were ideas brought into the mainstream by AMD years ago, and they should provide a significant boost to Intel's chip line, since the company was doing pretty well without them.

[frankskiss]

AMD is ahead

Why doesn't the author compare Intel's video efforts to AMD's or is he just another paid Intel advertising exec. Sorry for the sarcasum but Intel's noise is overwhelming everything on the internet, and thank God for the Europeans to put them right!
FrankisinCA

[libertyforall1776]

AVX Sounds like the hoopla around PowerPC's AltiVec aka "Velocity Engine"

*NM*

[wildchild_plasma_gyro]

Its like talking to Microsoft with the loud speaker turned on

The only interest groups will be those making unix like environment or that of prepitory tangiated unix with a twist of gates logic and some squarer windows. It's not like a couple of Mayans tuning star to star energy systems hiding somwhere lightly below the oceans bed dancing again after hving dun the moon walk for the umteenth time are about to say well i'm glad you engineers have spoken up about driver implimentation capabilities we were getting worried your usless silicon setup might actually have become so complicated to use that there isnt even a neron spare left to enlighten what passes as a brain these days come the big day.

Year thats some great news there Intel.

[krosavcheg]

It's like talking out my ass

Only my ass makes more intelligible sounds that you....

[corredorlobo]

To wildchild

Shouldn't you be posting on Slash-Dot? you definently have that mentality I'm sorry. Did you interject MSFT for no other reason than to bash? Where were you in the days of just IBM and the elitism, and DOS pre-Windows days? And where were Apple and Linux? Your punk butt probably does not know. Get an education

[hunter_jc]

Cool.

Hope more sickness can be cure from the benefit.

[davtx]

Intel sounds like Hillary

Intel is talking like Hilalry: I'll do this, I'll do that. Lets see it first and then I will believe it. Until then, like another reader wrote earlier, AMD is the leader.

[corredorlobo]

lessons for davtx

How do you spell Hillary? What does Hillary have to do with R and D and then the release of hardware (or software)? Ever hear of testing? Ever hear of tweaking out the problems? What happens when you shoot-off your mouth and then shoot early?

[grandunifiier]

1.5 trillion core processor

Call me when you have a "dual-core" of 1.5 trillion processors per hemi-sphere then Everyone will want one. You could implant a human into one of those.