Intel’s Larrabee: Intel’s most ambitious project which competes with AMD’s Fusion. Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core (many processor engines in a product) programming model and performance analysis for several applications.

Things you got to know about Larrabee

• New approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline
• A many-core (many processor engines in a product)
• Will target the personal computer graphics market
• Expected in 2009 or 2010
• Each core is Intel Architecture core
• Initial Larrabee architecture will target discrete graphics applications, support DirectX and OpenGL, and run existing games and programs.
• A broad potential range of highly parallel applications including scientific and engineering software will benefit from the Larrabee native C/C++ programming model.
• Features wide vector processing unit (VPU), multi-threading, 64-bit extensions and sophisticated pre-fetching.

• Includes a select few fixed function logic blocks to support graphics and other applications.
• A coherent on-die 2nd level cache allows efficient inter-processor communication and high-bandwidth local data to be access by CPU cores, making the writing of software programs simpler.
• The Larrabee native programming model supports a variety of highly parallel applications, including those that use irregular data structures. This enables development of graphics APIs, rapid innovation of new graphics algorithms, and true general purpose computation on the graphics processor with established PC software development tools.
• Larrabee features task scheduling which is performed entirely with software, rather than in fixed function logic. Therefore rendering pipelines and other complex software systems can adjust their resource scheduling based each workload’s unique computing demand.

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