Intel's Larrabee Hits 1TFlop of Computing Speed

December 4, 2009

Larrabee, Intel's first big push into the graphics processor unit (GPU) market, didn't make much of an impression at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) last September. However, the company made up for that at the recent SC09 supercomputing show.

The conference focuses on all things related to high performance computing, something GPU vendors have increasingly wanted a part of. ATI and nVidia were both on hand at SC09 to show off their products tuned for HPC, as was Intel. Only instead of just discussing the Nehalem generation of CPUs, Intel CTO Justin Rattner also showed significant progress in Larrabee's development. (See YouTube video clip here).

Intel has been coy about the exact specs of Larrabee. It has not said how many cores it will have, the clock speed or power draw. What is known is that it's a many-core design that uses older Pentium cores, updated with 64-bit extensions and SIMD (define) extensions plus a 1,024-bit high-speed ring bus to link all of the cores.

The IDF showing was, to be charitable, underwhelming, with an old 3D graphics game sitting idle on stage and barely any action taking place on screen. But during his keynote, Rattner showed a much better demonstration. He held up the Larrabee card, which is about as large as modern day cards, and then ran an HPC demo....

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Source: Internetnews.com