News Larrabee more efficient than GPUs at rasterisation

Ooops, I meant a single Core 2 core.

 

The Larrabee cores are supposed to be modified (and heavily shrunken) P54 cores. Yup, that's P54 as in 2nd generation Pentium processors.

 

the 300w power draw is pretty much the common estimate, on the web.

here's some links:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10024280-23.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)

I'm sorry if i misunderstood but did you just saw that a single C2 core runs at around 10w? so that would mean a quad core will only use 40w? Something doesn't sound right there...

Aslo the larrabee cores are as azreal pointed out p54 cores (which are pretty old). There has also been major speculation that the card will have up to 48 or more cores for the high end cards. Those cards are gonna be monstrosities.

Seeing as at 1ghz, it takes 24 of those core to run FEAR (and old game) at 60FPS. If larrabee launches with 24 cores at lets say 3ghz, which is another estimation of the operating speed, we might be looking at around 100FPS. (don't tell me its gonna be at 180fps, since by now people should realize nothing scales linearly) which isn't exactly revolutionary since my 8800gtx could already pull that off.

I'm also curious to see MultiAA performance, Anistropy performance, HDR performance on these cards, till now intel has been awfully quiet...

 

They never said the wanted to be King of the Hill...

 

no that's exactly what they said with their whole: "The GPU is dead" statements, I'm too lazy to find links right now.

 

Well, in the future, yes, but defintely not with their first generation of Larrabee.

 

I wonder what came first the Atom or the Larrabee?, both are based on a modified P3, in order architecture.

 

For power consumption the Larrabee cores will be more akin to the Atom, rather than a Core 2, from what I can gather.

 

I agree with your argument. Only if it takes off, and there is every chance that it won't. You only have to look at PhysX to see that it is a big IF.

Intel has only gone down the multi-core x86 route because it doesn't know how to do anything else. Interviews I've read with game developers would indicate to me that they aren't too thrilled by Larrabee, and Intel would surely need to partner with a developer to create that must-have halo product (not a pun, but like Halo did for the Xbox, and PhysX doesn't have) to drive adoption.

And it has to be a great product too, pretty and crap won't sell your mega-$$$ graphics card.

 

@turbotab:

lets assume each core @ 3ghz has a TDP of around 10w (seeing as a 1.6ghz atom has a TDP of around 4w-8w depending on the family)...

we have 32 of these cores on a larrabee card: 32 * 10 = 320W, now add voltage regulator circuitry and RAM power and other components - lets guess and say around 50w (just a guess seeing as a gtx260 core is rated at 180w TDP and uses around 230w full load)

we're now sitting on 370w for a 32 core card...

lets be optimistic and say it'll use 7w per core (unlikely since they want speeds of 3ghz) - we're left with a card that uses 274w, which is the same as a gtx285...

It's all speculation and guess work on my end tho, so chances are I'll be proved wrong... (I hope not, I want to see intel fail! intel740 style!! )

 

Remember that the Atom is comparable to a Celeron M, capable of running a PC on it's own. Therefore, I would guess lower consumption than Atom. Also, they could use Atom's Z family lower consumption model. Add to that possibly lower clocks and 32nm lithography and we could see something reasonable even for their high-end goal of 48 cores.

 

The Larrabee, what a stupid name, was 'benchmarked' at 1 GHz and IIRC, Intel according to the rumours, are aiming for 2GHz. This makes sense given that the broadly similar Pentium M architecture never run much above 2Ghz.
Intel could score big with Larry, with its combo GPU/CPU Clarkdale, especially if they are able to design a chip that offers enough grunt for mainstream gamers and some fancy EIST to turn the GPU off in desktop mode to reduce power consumption.
The Wii demonstrated that if there are ulterior benefits, people are willing to overlook the lack of outright power, well maybe not Bit-Techers

 

Could this be used general purpose processing? Couple of these would make a fantastic code compiling box.

 

People speculating also need to add in performance to their speculations.

A 3 GHz Larrabee with 32 cores can issue 16 instructions per clock, plus can do fused multiply add, doubling GFLOPS.

3 * 32 * 16 * 2 = 3072 GFLOPS

370W for 3072 GFLOPS. Yes please.

If it could do Fused Multiply Add and another instruction such as Add/Mul (like nvidia's cards) they'd be able to claim another 50% on top of that. This is extremely unlikely however.

A 16 core Larrabee @ 2 GHz will break the TFLOP barrier though, and even the pessimists will agree that a 16 core version at 2 GHz is very likely.


Larrabee what a stupid name? As opposed to going through ever number combination in existence like nvidia? It's a codename btw, its not meant for consumption by the ignorant.

Get over the x86 cores too. They are going to be something like Atom. They aren't meant to be fast, they provide an easy to program platform. The speed comes from the 16 issue SIMD AVX cores (LRB equivalent of SSE). SIMD is no different to all the graphics cards on the market today. All nvidia's cards are SIMD, and ATI's too.

I'm not sure why people get their knickers in a twist so badly and say how Nvidia/ATI are pro's. There's not a lot to be pro about. GPU's are relatively basic processors compared to CPU's. The art is feeding all the cores with the required data.

 

sorry to say this, but your calculations are a bit....... well, too simple.

FLOP means floating point operations, and 16 instructions per clock doesn't mean 16 FLOPs per clock. because floating points are hard to do, it may need to break into micro-code and executed in many steps.

the nVidia shader pipelines, however, are optimised for calculating floating point units with all the necessary bits and bobs to do it in one clock cycle, that's the advantage of RICS architecture, and that's why x86 is not the answer to everything.