Larrabee

[Bill Baxter]

Details are our about Intel's Larrabee multi-core x86 processor.
I haven't had a chance to look into it myself yet, but it definitely
is looking like the multi-core future is right around the corner.

http://levelofdetail.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/larrabee-paper-and-articles/
http://www.gpgpu.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2008/08/04#larrabeeSIGGRAPH08

Here's the abstract from the paper they'll present at SIGGRAPH next week:

This paper presents a many-core visual computing architecture
code named Larrabee, a new software rendering pipeline, a manycore
programming model, and performance analysis for several
applications. Larrabee uses multiple in-order x86 CPU cores that
are augmented by a wide vector processor unit, as well as some
fixed function logic blocks. This provides dramatically higher
performance per watt and per unit of area than out-of-order CPUs
on highly parallel workloads. It also greatly increases the
flexibility and programmability of the architecture as compared to
standard GPUs. A coherent on-die 2nd level cache allows efficient
inter-processor communication and high-bandwidth local data
access by CPU cores. Task scheduling is performed entirely with
software in Larrabee, rather than in fixed function logic. The
customizable software graphics rendering pipeline for this
architecture uses binning in order to reduce required memory
bandwidth, minimize lock contention, and increase opportunities
for parallelism relative to standard GPUs. The Larrabee native
programming model supports a variety of highly parallel
applications that use irregular data structures. Performance
analysis on those applications demonstrates Larrabee's potential
for a broad range of parallel computation.

Looks like you have to have have access to the ACM digital library for
now to get your hands on the paper.
For those who do, here's the link:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1360612.1360617



--bb