Larrabee

Intel Talks Graphics

Intel is still very conservative when it comes to details on its Larrabee project. Most of what’s already known comes from leaked presentations and the subsequent online analysis. Nevertheless, we were interested to hear how Intel plans to change the face of software development with an approach that borrows from its processor business.

Rather than zero in on specifics about the technology, Pat Gelsinger chose to paint a broad picture about what Intel thinks is necessary for an era of visual computing. Think accurate shadows and behavioral realism able to give us new levels of interactivity. This is a platform problem, says Intel. The company has already talked about its next-gen processor and chipset. Now it’s working on the graphics side.

Larrabee's many-core configuration and IA-compatible programmability

After listening to the recorded briefing twice, I still came away scratching my head a bit, wondering how Larrabee would manifest itself in the 2009-2010 timeframe. The highlights Intel’s Gelsinger covered include:

• Many-core architecture running in parallel


• Big vector units per core


• Cache coherent


• IA-programmable

When you combine all of those high-level attributes, it becomes a little clearer that Intel is designing a graphics architecture that will benefit from the company’s extensive library of programming tools, easing the development workload.

Here’s where Larrabee may take the graphics industry by surprise. Remember the industry reaction when the Cell Broadband Engine started making its rounds? Programming the hardware was said to be extremely difficult, despite the results you could get out of it. According to Gelsinger, the reaction from software developers involved with Larrabee has, in contrast, been tremendous thus far—in fact, he says it has received more enthusiasm than any other program in his 30-year career.

Intel plans to add software tools to make programming Larrabee easier for ISVs

Pressed for more information, Gelsinger pulled back a bit. He did, however, reveal that Larrabee would emerge as a discrete graphics product with full support for OpenGL and DirectX. However, it’d also incorporate a richer programming model enabled by Intel’s own tools. Because the software guys are already familiar with a lot of those tools via the company’s CPUs, Intel expects that the ISV community will be able to do more than it has in the past with DirectX, CUDA, and so forth.