Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

SAN FRANCISCO--Heads up, Nvidia. Intel demonstrated its Larrabee graphics chip for the first time Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum.

Larrabee will be Intel's first discrete, or standalone, graphics processor in about 10 years and is expected to compete with graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD's ATI unit. The demo used an early "stepping," or version, of Larrabee, which is expected to come out commercially sometime next year.

Larrabee will be targeted initially at the gaming market. The demonstration was based on the game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from Splash Damage (See video.)

"This is a ray tracing demo," said Intel senior research scientist Bill Mark during the demonstration. "We took the content, the textures, and geometry, pulled it out of that game and put it into our ray tracing engine."

Mark described ray tracing technology as allowing "you to simulate the interaction of light with matter in a way that's accurate and makes it really easy to get effects like light and shadows."

"If you look at the water. That's done with only 10 lines of...code," he said. The demo was written in C++.

Mark said the same thing can be done on a standard multicore Intel processor but with Larrabee there is more parallelism--or the ability to do more things at the same time.

Intel said Tuesday that it is investing $12 million in a visual-computing research center in Europe. This comes as Intel prepares to bring out its first graphics chip in more than a decade by early next year.

Intel Visual Computing Institute will research techniques such as ray tracing to bring special effects to real-time applications such as games.

(Credit: Intel)

Opening Tuesday, the Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The company says the center "will explore advanced graphics and visual computing technologies."

The investment, to be made over five years, represents Intel's largest European university collaboration, the company said.

"Intel's visual computing vision is to realize computer applications that look real, act real and feel real," Intel said in a statement. "A key mission of the latest member of Intel Labs Europe is to contribute to the company's tera-scale research program, which explores how multiple computing cores will be used to produce higher-performance computing and more life-like graphics," Intel said.

The lab will conduct both basic and applied research in realistic, interactive computer graphics and natural user interfaces, according to Intel. By year's end the institute will employ about a dozen researchers from such sources as Intel, Saarland University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.

The Visual Computing Institute will develop new software designs and architectures, visual-computing algorithms and parallel-computing solutions and will establish a feedback loop to Intel's hardware design labs--including in Barcelona, Spain, and Braunschweig, Germany.

Intel CEO Paul Otellinli recently said that the future Larrabee graphics processor shown in April at the Intel Developers Conference in Beijing was a "high-end version" and added that "there's obviously other versions that have far fewer cores for different price points." Volume shipments of Larrabee are expected early next year.

As Intel prepares to invade Nvidia turf, large companies at the Intel server chip rollout Monday stated--in some cases quite objectively--what graphics chip suppliers need to do to make this technology more palatable for high-performance computing.

Lincoln Wallen, head of research and development at DreamWorks Animation

(Credit: Screen capture by Brooke Crothers)

Besides competing in the gaming graphics market, Intel is eying large high-performance computing customers such as Dreamworks Animation (whose "Monsters vs. Aliens" opened last weekend to large box office numbers) for its future Larrabee graphics chip.

Nvidia is already a player in the so-called General Purpose GPU space, which applies graphics processing units (GPUs) to high-performance computing. As described by Nvidia, high-performance computing on the GPU uses a CPU and GPU together in a heterogeneous computing model, with the "sequential" part of the application running on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part running on the hundreds of processing cores built into the GPU.

Application developers have to modify their application to take the compute-intensive kernels (core components of an operating system) and map them to the GPU. The rest of the application remains on the CPU.

At the Intel "Nehalem" server chip event on Monday, a panel of representatives from large companies addressed the issue of CPU versus GPU. Currently, these customers are using CPUs to do their data crunching.

Keith Gray, manager, high performance and technical computing at oil giant BP, spelled out why he has hesitated to use GPUs to date while expressing interest in adopting them in the future. "Our business is about accelerating our development of new seismic imaging research algorithms. At this point we actually believe the level of programming difficulty (and) lack of standardization of application development tools make the move to accelerated computing a bit risky," he said.

CPU (left) versus GPU

(Credit: Nvidia)

Gray continued. "We are watching the evolution of the programming interfaces. Once those are better standardized, once the issues of moving data back and forth from the general purpose system to an accelerator is addressed, we'll be very interested in taking advantage of it," he said.

Lincoln Wallen, head of research and development at DreamWorks Animation, is also looking into exploiting power of the GPU for tasks such as rendering. "We're looking forward to exploit more flexible compute models, perhaps involve more of the graphics processing functionality but tightly coupled with very powerful CPUs to address the particular way in which we generate images, very soft body, lots of geometry generation," he said.

Wallen continued that, as he sees it, Larrabee offers an advantage because of its tight coupling between the CPU and GPU. "The promise of Larrabee with that tight coupling and the programming model offers a great opportunity to start to explore that type of architecture for our particular workloads," he said.

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 watching the progress intently. Intel's extensive and deep relationships with computer makers could give it an inside track with customers and upset the graphics duopoly now enjoyed by Nvidia and AMD. In the last decade Intel has not competed in the standalone, or "discrete" graphics chip market where Nvidia and AMD dominate. Rather, it has been a supplier of integrated graphics, a low-performance technology built into its chipsets that offers only a minimal gaming experience. (In the 1990s, Intel introduced the i740 GPU which, in relative terms, was not a success.)

Forsyth said that there is not yet a Larrabee chip to work with--it's expected late this year or early next year--and that "a lot of key developers are still being consulted on the design of Larrabee." But Intel will offer ways for developers to test the processor, he said. "On the Intel Web site there will be a C++ prototype library. It doesn't have the speed of Larrabee but has the same functionality. Developers can get a feel for the language, get a feel for the power of the machine."

Beyond games, Intel is also trying to catch a building wave of applications that run on the many-core architectures inherent to graphics chips. Nvidia and AMD graphics chips pack hundreds of processing cores that can be tapped for not only accelerating sophisticated games like Crysis but for doing scientific research and high-performance computing tasks.

One of the largest test sites for Larrabee is Dreamworks, which will use Larrabee for rendering and animation. To date, Dreamworks had to wait overnight to get a rendering project completed. "Using (the) Nehalem (processor), Dreamworks can almost do it in real time and it is only going to better with Larrabee," said Nick Knupffer, an Intel spokesperson.

Larrabee is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

"But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it's bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers," Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel's x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.

ntel is touting the performance of Larrabee's vector unit.

(Credit: Intel)

"It's based on a lot of small, efficient in-order cores. And we put a whole bunch of them on one bit of silicon. We join them together with very high bandwidth communication so they can talk to each other very fast and they can talk to off-chip memory very fast and they can talk to other various units on the chip very fast." In-order processing cores are used, for example, in the original Pentium design and in Intel's Atom processor.

"It's the same programming model they know from multicore systems already but there's a lot more of them," he said.

The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," Forsyth said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set."

Forsyth described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."

At GDC, Intel is encouraging developers to experiment. "They're going to have questions about how do I find 16 things to do at once. But a lot of it is just getting in there and playing with the thing," according to Forsyth. The GDC sessions will be a tour around Larrabee's instructions--"how to actually use these new instructions," he said.

And what about markets beyond gaming? "A funny thing happened on the way to the architecture. We designed this architecture to be 100 percent graphics focused. Whatever we needed to do to get graphics good, we did. And then a year ago, we looked at what we had and said how much of this stuff is actually specific to graphics. It turns out, very little. Graphics workloads are increasingly similar to GPGPU (general-purpose graphics processor unit), increasingly similar to high-powered (high-performance) computing. So, we actually have very little that is specific to graphics. Most of the instruction set is very general-purpose."

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

Intel is preparing to become a graphics powerhouse too.

(Credit: Intel)

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 going to get too excited about gaming on Intel integrated graphics. Intel graphics--at least to date--haven't provided anything more than a minimal gaming experience--and they have been priced that way, coming virtually free on PCs. While upcoming technologies like Intel's Moorestown system-on-a-chip may create some new opportunities on small devices like high-end smartphones, it will still be limited in its graphics capabilities.

All of this will soon (this year?) be eclipsed by Larrabee. In response to a question about what kind of Larrabee support GPA offers, I got this elliptic but telling response. "In the future, GPA will also support upcoming Intel graphics and many-core related products. There are some absolutely exciting features we are currently developing which will change the way people think about performance tools, and which will allow developers to truly harness unbridled computing power," said Aaron Davies, senior marketing manager, Visual Computing Software Division, Intel.

Think Intel isn't getting ready for Larrabee--and, generally, for a bigger presence in graphics? Take a look at this Visual Adrenaline Web site. And in particular, this page: "As multi-core gives way to many-core architectures, graphics processing tasks can be performed faster and more efficiently. Visual computing and parallelism share a common playbook. Developers, artists, and digital content creators, who have tapped the many multi-core and threading resources available from Intel, will reap additional many-core benefits."

Sounds like Larrabee to me.

GPA is also, of course, targeted at Intel chipsets, allowing developers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and optimize games for Intel-based desktop PCs and laptops. But I'll wait for Larrabee, as I think many at Intel are doing too.

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 stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business." (CPU stands for central processing unit; GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

This is not the first time Huang has said this. He said--now rather famously--last year that Nvidia was going to "open up a can of whoop-ass" on Intel when responding to a question about Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics technology. He has also said many times in many forums that Intel's CPUs are "good enough"--not so thinly veiled code for: Intel CPU technology is past its prime.

So, the question must be posed: is he right? Are consumers placing more importance on the GPU than the CPU? And, maybe more importantly, are PC and chipmakers now putting significantly more development and marketing resources into all things GPU?

A quick answer to the first question is that consumers expect PCs to perform better when handling Web-based graphics, games, and video. So, yes, consciously or unconsciously, consumers are putting more emphasis on the GPU.

And there's a short answer to the latter question too: Advanced Micro Devices. If you look at AMD's Puma laptop platform, for example, there is an increased emphasis on graphics as being the performance driver of the platform. And certainly, as a chipmaker, the graphics technology from its ATI unit is making more of a mark these days than its CPUs.

But that doesn't mean the momentum is necessarily in Nvidia's (or ATI's) favor. The biggest sea change occurring in the PC market today is the not the shift from the CPU to the GPU, but the shift from mainstream laptops to inexpensive laptops, aka Netbooks. And right now, that market is all Intel, all the time.

"The bigger dramatic change that's happening in the industry is the en masse migration to low-cost solutions...Netbooks," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. He says Intel integrated graphics, in this sense, may pose more, not less, of a challenge in the future for Nvidia.

And the Netbook market demonstrates probably more than anything what the consumer mindset is. Graphics don't have to be great (or even that good) but adequate. (Though Nvidia is trying to disprove this with its Ion platform.)

Though Nvidia's CEO is right when he says GPU technology is far ahead of integrated graphics (Intel's current style of graphics), he's not necessarily right when he says there's a massive mind share shift to an Nvidia-style GPU-centric universe.

Moreover, Intel continues to improve its integrated graphics and is readying a discrete Larrabee graphics processor, to boot. Kumar says that Intel may be more of a direct competitor with Nvidia in the future than AMD-ATI.

So, the question is probably better posed this way: Will the world's PC consumers in the future see the Nvidia model or the Intel model as the true core of the PC? You decide.

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 claims Sony favors Larrabee over Nvidia for its PlayStation 4. (The other major piece of silicon used in the current PlayStation is a Cell processor developed jointly by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba.)

For the record, an Intel spokesperson said the company "cannot comment on rumor or speculation." Sony in Europe reportedly didn't mince words, however, comparing the report to some of the 20th century's great fiction. Though another reported comment from Sony is more insipid and PR-like.

The U.K. report claims Intel paid to play. The report also hinges on the premise that Sony doesn't like Nvidia anymore. (And claims there are others that feel the same way about Nvidia.) Even if there is some special hatred there (as the reporter claims), that's not news--and applies to just about any acrimony-ridden hardware relationship in Silicon Valley. (Just peruse some of the tender exchanges between Intel and Microsoft in court records over the years.)

Anti-Nvidia bias (which is palpable in the report) aside, if there is a broader truth to this, that is, that game box makers are considering Larrabee, the chip would become a serious contender and take its place with GPUs from Nvidia and AMD's ATI graphics unit. But we won't know this for a while since no one (that I know of) has actually put Larrabee through the paces (though DreamWorks has hinted at this). And the PlayStation 4 isn't due, reportedly, until 2012.

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 available for free at stores such as Target and Best Buy.)

Stereoscopy--which in a primitive form has been around since the 1840s--creates the illusion of depth by presenting a slightly different image to each eye. Starting this year, DreamWorks will produce all of its feature films in stereoscopic 3D for use with the special glasses.

DreamWorks CEO Jeffry Katzenberg dons Intru 3D glasses that are used for viewing the Super Bowl 3D trailer of Monsters vs. Aliens

(Credit: Intel)

The InTru3D technology will provide more vibrant colors than traditional technologies that use 3D glasses, according to Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer of DreamWorks, in an interview posted on an Intel Web page.

"Instead of (traditional) red and blue lensing, there's a different set of filters that are used" that are better at reproducing color, said Katzenberg. "The second thing is a greater level of precision in terms of the broadcast signal--right eye, left eye. The blurry kind of stuff is cleaned up a lot," he said.

But there's a lot more going on with Intel and DreamWorks than meets the eye. Think Intel's future Larrabee graphics chip is just a smoke screen or paper tiger? Listening to Katzenberg, it sounds very real. "We are well on our way to upgrading our software to really take advantage of Larrabee," said Katzenberg, in the Intel video interview. "Larrabee raises the bar of what we can do not just by 2X or 3X but by 20X," he said.

DreamWorks is also using Intel software tools. "This is allowing us to create a completely new paradigm in movies," Katzenberg said, referring to Intel's InTru3D technology, which Intel describes as "uniting the best in computer-generated moviemaking with the latest high-performance processing technologies."

Last year, DreamWorks said it was dropping technology from Advanced Micro Devices in favor of Intel--and at that time the two companies announced a strategic partnership aimed at redefining 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD.

DreamWorks uses rendering farms with thousands of Intel processing cores to create animation.

Before it adopts Larrabee (later this year), DreamWorks will move part of its rendering farm to Intel's Nehalem processor for servers, due later this quarter.

• Click here for more Super Bowl stories.

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 integrated into Intel chipsets come virtually free on tens of millions of PCs shipped worldwide every year, an offer that many PC vendors find hard to refuse. The resulting less expensive PCs are, in turn, welcomed by consumers.

But the discrete graphics market is a different creature. It is dominated by Nvidia and AMD's ATI graphics chip unit. Both companies supply chips that easily rival--or best--any Intel chip in complexity. Nvidia's latest chip, the GTX 280, boasts 1.4 billion transistors and 240 stream processors. In short, it is an extremely complex parallel-computing engine.

"Intel claims Larrabee is a graphics engine intended to outperform Nvidia's GPU offerings. The audacity of this claim is startling," according to a report issued by Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. "Nvidia has had over 10 years to optimize the 3D graphics pipeline, the necessary drivers, the platform connections needed to supply the memory bandwidth required, and to work with the software and apps developers," he writes. (Note: Kumar started coverage of Intel at Collins Stewart on September 4 with a "buy" rating.)

Intel doesn't necessarily disagree with the spirit of the statement. "I certainly expect Nvidia and ATI to carry on being successful," Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, said in an interview this week. "They both have considerable expertise and customer base and all of that," he said.

But he contends that Intel's approach is different. "I do think the changes going forward are a little bit different for the industry. It's not just multicore but how easy that multicore is to program," Maloney said, referring to the fact that Larrabee will have many processing cores. "The Nvidia guys got their experience base and their views on that. We're trying a different approach. This is something that will unfold over a few years. I don't think anything's going to happen overnight."

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said the chipmaker isn't simply diving headlong into the market. "We've had this architecture work going on for years. Design teams built up," he said in an interview at the Intel Developer Forum in August.

Kumar claims that the task is extremely daunting. "Two of Intel's main challenges at present are the GPU threat by Nvidia and the heavy lifting required for software to make use of multicore processors. With the upcoming Larrabee chip, Intel has chosen to undertake a frontal assault on both of these problems simultaneously," Kumar writes.

Drawing on the Pentium heritage
The report also claims that one of Larrabee's purported strengths--its x86 heritage that taps into a large existing software infrastructure--is a weakness, too, because it is based on the Pentium, a design Intel launched in 1993. "Larrabee proposes to compete by fielding a couple of dozen x86 cores on a single chip. Each core, by dint of its (Pentium) heritage...is carrying all of the baggage of the full x86 instruction set," Kumar writes, adding that the Pentium design is "antiquated."

CNET Blog Network contributor Peter Glaskowsky wrote in August that "the power consumption of a 32-core design with all the extra overhead required by x86 processing would be very high."

Code would not necessarily execute efficiently either, according to Kumar. "The vast majority of x86 code in the world today was not compiled to optimize execution on a Pentium-class core...and will suffer the same old slowdowns," he said.

But Intel's Larry Seiler, principal engineer at Intel's Visual Computing Group, says there's a method behind the madness. At a session in August, he described the original Larrabee experiment. "They replaced the modern out-of-order core with a core derived from the Pentium design. So it's a much smaller core. It's in-order. It doesn't have the advanced capabilities (of more modern processors). But what they found is that they could fit ten cores...in the space of two (modern cores)," he said.

So, Larrabee's Pentium-derived design "has five times as many cores; each core has a vector (processor) unit that is four times as wide. So for throughput computing, potentially, it can run 20 times faster," Seiler said.

This was the key idea that made the original group that came up with the idea of Larrabee realize that it could design an architecture built out of CPU components that achieves the kind of performance and parallelism that previously had been the domain of graphics processors, Seiler said.

Kumar will be surprised if Intel pulls it off. "If Larrabee ends up knocking out Nvidia, it will be a shocking upset, considering how much inertia in the software industry is present, the degree of difficulty many-core chips present, and the high efficiency of Nvidia's existing designs," Kumar writes.

Intel's Gelsinger relishes the challenge. "We've not been bashful about saying we want to win Nehalem," Gelsinger said. Nehalem is Intel's next-generation chip architecture that will roll out over the next 12 months. "(Larrabee) will plug into Nehalem, and into Westmere, and into Sandy Bridge," he said, referring to future Intel chip platforms. "And volume consumer applications as well," he said.

"It's cool to watch somebody step up to the plate and point to the fences like Babe Ruth. Just remember: Babe Ruth also struck out a lot," Kumar concludes in his report.