Intel 'Larrabee' GPU; Hybrid CPUs
Category: CPU's, Gaming, ManufacturersPosted: March 17, 2008 04:23PM
Author: jammin
There were rumblings last year about Intel re-entering the discrete graphics card market and I'm sure many of us will remember the Intel i740, which was the company's last discrete solution. Well ahead of its Spring Developer Forum in Shanghai, Intel has given an update on the status of its new GPU core, which will be quite different to current offerings from NVIDIA or ATI. For a start, it will is based on the x86 instruction set commonly used in CPU architecture. It is also a multi-core design, though how many cores has not been stated (early schematics seemingly included 16 cores). Apparently the architecture could scale to several thousand in-order cores, and will support OpenGL, DirectX and ray-tracing instructions. The Larrabee GPU core should debut sometime early next year as samples. Intel also talked about integrating graphics cores into CPUs, much in the vein of AMDs Fusion processors. These are likely to use designs derived from the G45 IGP initially, paired with a couple of Nehalem cores in both desktop and notebook versions. These should be due in the first half of 2009, crucially ahead of the expected debut for Fusion processors.
