Details About Intel's Larabee Emerge

A lot of rumors have been flying around about the Intel Larabee, ever since the chip major announced its plans for entering the discrete GPU market, which is completely dominated by Nvidia and to a lesser degree ATI. Finally some details have emerged about the chip and it’s quite intriguing.

Larabee will be a concrete product by 2009/2010 and will support both OpenGL and DirectX. The company also expects Larabee to influence the CPU market, which in recent times has made the transition to multi-core processing. This effect will be similar to Nvidia’s CUDA program.

The paper "Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing" describes the Larabee architecture has having had its pipeline origins from the original dual-core Pentium processor. This new architecture will provide enhancements such as wide VPU (vector processing unit), multi-threading, 64-bit extension support and will also feature sophisticated pre-fetching.

Larabee will also support a native programming model that will allow for different kinds of developments to take place in relations to new graphics APIs, new graphic algorithms and will allow the new platform to be used for general purpose computation for current generation software development tools.

For a detailed report on what this new platform will entail for end-users and other technical details, check out this report.