Intel looks to get into the graphics market in 2009, and in a big way
Next month heralds the 2008 Spring Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, China. Pre-show briefings opened up with a quick mention on the status of
Larrabee,
Intel's upcoming graphics core.
Larrabee differs significantly from AMD's Radeon and NVIDIA's GeForce processors. For starters,
Larrabee is based on the x86 instruction set found in CPU architecture. Intel vice president Steve Smith emphasized that
Larrabee is not just a GPU, but a multi-core die capable of any stream processing task.
Smith would not detail exactly how many cores reside on
Larrabee, though early schematics from 2006 detail designs with 16 cores. Each in-order core is capable of operating in excess of 2 GHz.
Larrabee can apparently scale to several thousand cores, sharing much of the same research as Intel's Tera-scale project. In addition to the x86 approach, the company announced it will soon announce another SSE-like extension set, dubbed Advanced Vector Extensions. These extensions will likely be what separates
Larrabee's x86 instruction set from the x86 instructions featured on Core 2 Duo and Phenom. Smith said
Larrabee will support OpenGL, DirectX and ray-tracing instructions.
However, to much disappointment,
Larrabee will not find a home on 45nm
Nehalem processors, scheduled for an early 2009 launch. Smith said
Larrabee samples will be ready in Q4 2008, with shipments in 2009, though the initial launch appears to be only for discrete computing.
Likely, CPU integration of
Larrabee will not come until the 32nm shrink of
Nehalem, codenamed
Gesher, if ever.
An Intel engineer tells
DailyTech, "You have to walk before you can run." Walking, at Intel, means integrating a much simpler GPU into the processor first.
Intel’s hybrid CPU and GPU chips are set to be released in two flavors, both of which will be based on the
Nehalem CPU architecture. The first version, dubbed
Havendale, will be a desktop chip, while the second version, dubbed
Auburndale, will be a notebook chip.
Auburndale and
Havendale will have two
Nehalem cores paired with a graphics subsystem. The twin cores will share 4MB of L2 cache and feature an integrated dual-channel memory controller that supports memory configurations up to DDR3-1333.
The graphics subsystem will be initially derived from Intel’s G45 integrated graphics. This indicates that neither
Auburndale nor
Havendale will be for heavy graphics processing, but will be more of an integrated graphics replacement.
In fact, both graphics cores leave out support for key features of DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Supposedly, this G45-derived core will eventually be replaced by a cut-down
Larrabee graphics processor, or a derivative.
According to Intel roadmaps, the new processors are expected to enter the market in the first half of 2009. This beats out the expected time of arrival of AMD’s Fusion processors, which are
planned to debut in the second half of 2009.
In the meantime, Smith promises the discrete
Larrabee offerings will compete competitively with Radeon and GeForce offerings when its finally announced.