for those of you who dont regularly read anandtech.
AnandTech - Intel Larrabee architecture revealed
cliffs: the architecture is based off of their Pentium 1 architecture with some major improvements. it will be a fully programmable X86 processor and at launch will have support for DX10 and OpenGL 2.1, but due to the nature of the architecture it will need only a driver update to go to DX11 and future releases of OGL. because of the way the architecture is designed, its individual cores can communicate with each other easily enough, so intel could potentially release cards in the $100-1000 dollar range with a different card at each $100 increment the way they do with their CPUs, with each increase in price giving you another core. on top of this, it will mean that intel could seamlessly code a driver that would support multiple card performance on a scale that nvidia and ATI are yet to achieve. also, because intel is using a generalized chip architecture for the entire card instead of using specific components for certain things, it can load balance tasks across all its chips evenly instead of getting bottlenecked by say texture units the way the current ATI cards are, or by lack of SPUs the way Nvidia is now. to top this all off, if there is a feature that a programmer wants for their graphics engine that isnt included in the DX or OGL API, since the chip executes x86 instructions all the programmer would need to do is write the feature into their engine using C/C++ code.
anything more would go beyond simple cliffs, the article is 16 pages long and can get hard to understand if you dont already understand the technical side of CPUs already, but the author always sums things up in a way that is easy to understand for the less technically minded user. all i can say is this looks to be simply phenomenal, and could take the industry by storm if the card can at least match the performance of ATI and Nvidia offerings when it is released
AnandTech - Intel Larrabee architecture revealed
cliffs: the architecture is based off of their Pentium 1 architecture with some major improvements. it will be a fully programmable X86 processor and at launch will have support for DX10 and OpenGL 2.1, but due to the nature of the architecture it will need only a driver update to go to DX11 and future releases of OGL. because of the way the architecture is designed, its individual cores can communicate with each other easily enough, so intel could potentially release cards in the $100-1000 dollar range with a different card at each $100 increment the way they do with their CPUs, with each increase in price giving you another core. on top of this, it will mean that intel could seamlessly code a driver that would support multiple card performance on a scale that nvidia and ATI are yet to achieve. also, because intel is using a generalized chip architecture for the entire card instead of using specific components for certain things, it can load balance tasks across all its chips evenly instead of getting bottlenecked by say texture units the way the current ATI cards are, or by lack of SPUs the way Nvidia is now. to top this all off, if there is a feature that a programmer wants for their graphics engine that isnt included in the DX or OGL API, since the chip executes x86 instructions all the programmer would need to do is write the feature into their engine using C/C++ code.
anything more would go beyond simple cliffs, the article is 16 pages long and can get hard to understand if you dont already understand the technical side of CPUs already, but the author always sums things up in a way that is easy to understand for the less technically minded user. all i can say is this looks to be simply phenomenal, and could take the industry by storm if the card can at least match the performance of ATI and Nvidia offerings when it is released
. the team designing the Larrabee is comprised of people like