Intel's Larrabee: Clearing the confusion, is it discrete or IGP??

Intel's project Larrabee is their answer to Nvidia's "Technical Computing" and "General Purpose GPU". Heard of how Nvidia wants to put their GPUs into CPU occupied territories?? Well, Larrabee is Intel's strike against Nvidia on GPGPU.

Lot of people seem to be confused about whether Larrabee is discrete or integrated. So, what is it?? Well, I can tell you one thing, if a version comes for GPU purposes, initially the pricing will be no less than $300. From my initial impression of Intel's presentations, Larrabee might be even bigger than Nehalem, both in FP performance and die size!!

There is no way that Larrabee can be scaled down to IGP market without substantial scale down. Larrabee is discrete. It's coming late 2009, early 2010.

Auburndale is Notebook version of Nehalem. It will feature GPU integrated with the CPU. The GPU architecture is enhanced version of the upcoming Montevina's X4500, which is enhanced version of the X3100 on Santa Rosa. It will be much faster than current gen, or Montevina gen of course, but they are not integrating 8800GTX on the CPU.

On another note, unless there's something significant happening in the near future, I have doubts that even Auburndale's IGP will catch up to the AMD/ATI IGP that will be released in mere months. Yea, Intel is THAT much behind. Think of Core 2 vs. P4. Except that "P4" is Intel's X3100 and Core 2 is AMD/ATI's IGP. I don't have much doubts that Nehalem will outperform anything AMD got in the CPU side, but thanks to their excellent integrated graphics, I have a feeling they will start to steal CPU marketshare.

 

Asking if Larrabee is discrete or intergrated is like saying is the GF7 or X1K series discrete or intergrated.

It's a family of products, not just a single entity, even though the GPU product is the most spoken of. We already know somewhat of the CPU-only and GPU-only derivatives.
What we don't know is the dependancy of the sub-cores.

If they can be assigned to whatever task they are need for either predetermined or better yet on the fly, there isn't really a need for it to be an IGP so much as a CPU+GPU chip similar to AMD's Fusion, only much more flexible especially from a production standpoint.
With 16-24+ rumoured cores sofar and 2 different memory interface configurations detailed sofar, there's no reason to think that they couldn't make it a combo processor.

Nehalem however is said to rely on an external on package die for it's GPU functionality, so it's less flexible as a design, and also offers some problems a unified solution doesn't. The Nehalem solution would be fixed function though and that's the major drawback fo the current design shown for the first gen Fusion products, whereas the Larrabee design show a more flexbile route which at the very least would allow for production changes depending on which were the more succesful solution allowing them to vary their focus and not rely on a single production line overall instead more like multiple similar lines.

As for the price, $300 isn't too much money for what could amount to the CPU+VPU on a single chip, or even a very wide CPU, the QX Extreme series right now sell for $1,000 and the Lowly Quads for $250. As a discrete card the price would depend on the performance, just like AMD probably expected to get more for their R600, when it finally made it to market and found itself wanting in the apps of the day, they didn't charge $600+ for it, they charged less. That's the market.

As for performance against AMD's solutions stealing market share, it depends alot on how they sell the market, because as they've proven before, they can sell an inferior product at large multiples of anything else thanks to their established name and retailer relations. AMD could 'steal a large number of units' but still not get much share of the market, and in order to capitalize they would really need to prepare to take that share, something they were never able to do in the Athlon era when demand far outstripped their output potential.

 

Apart from the obvious fact that we're discussing a product abotu which virtually no information is available, the entire point in Larrabee, as far as I know, is that it is integrated into the CPU.

So it's definitely not discrete. As for integrated, well, not integrated into the mobo either.

But honestly, why speculate? All we know is that apparently it's going to be different from existing GPU's.

 

No it's not. It probably will be at some point, but it's starting out as a discreet part.

It's a very interesting product, and I'm looking forward to see how it performs compared to more specialized "real" graphics hardware. From what I've been reading, the expectation is it won't really measure up, but still, using a bunch of low-end x86 cores as processors on a video card is a very interesting idea.

 

Errr.... What'd be the point in using x86 cores if you're not integrating it onto the CPU?
That makes no sense. Then you get all the inefficiency of x86, without the advantage that the extra hardware can be shared between CPU and GPU workloads.

Got sources to back that one up? (From what I know, everything about it, except maybe the existence of the codename, is hearsay and rumors)

 

Whether it makes sense or not remains to be seen. Presumably the point of using low-end x86 CPUs over traditional GPU processors is that the hardware ends up being more flexible, and Intel gets to leverage their existing designs.

The first CPUs with integrated graphics from Intel will be using their traditional graphics cores, not this.
Scaled down versions of the technology will most likely eventually be integrated into low end/budget type CPUs, but it's starting as a discreet part, and it's much more interesting as a discreet part, since that way both it, and it's companion CPU get to have more cores and/or cache.

Sources for what? Intel's talked about the technology quite a bit. I'm not sure what type of hearsay or rumors you're talking about. We've got a solid idea of the technology, a solid idea of when they're going to try to launch it, etc. Only thing we don't know is how it will actually perform. It's speculated that it'll end up as a low end part when it launches, but I'm still interested in it just because it's such a ridiculously strange idea on the surface

 

Oh please, they had lots of presentations about Larrabee and some hints that the cores are bigger than Nehalem, which is big itself. If they do not want to charge extra couple of hundred bucks on a CPU+GPU combo, it'll be integrated, which makes Larrabee IGP out of the question at least for the time being.

We already know what Auburndale/Havendale's IGP+CPU will be. It'll be X3100-arch derivative with 12 EUs.

Wanna know some technical info about Larrabee?? This was on Intel presentation(though not for general public):

49.5mm2 x 49.5mm2 package size, 45nm, 1.7-2.5GHz, >150W, 16-24 cores, 2 DP FP Flops/cycle/core, components connected by 256 byte/cycle ring bus

No sense?? Inefficiency?? So far, the only ISA with real future is x86, and the fastest CPU architecture is also x86. Whether that will be true in graphics no one knows. Apparently Intel believes in x86 everywhere.

Does this presentation look like anything that's gonna be on an IGP??: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3264&p=5

There is no other obvious reason than having integrated graphics. It's to make it cheaper and low power.

 

Yeah, it's just a complete riot that x86 is now going after GRAPHICS. I'm very, very interested in how it's going to perform.

I'm confused by why some people are acting like we don't know anything about it. There's all kinds of info on it going back a while now. If it was just integrated graphics, it wouldn't be interesting. But what they're doing could turn out to be monumental...or at the least a very interesting failure!