Nvidia partnering with Intel for Larrabee ?

[AirRaid]

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/242


Larrabee: 16 Cores, 2GHz, 150W, and more...
Friday 01st June 2007, 06:08:45 PM, written by Arun


It is amazing how much information is out there in the wild, when you
know where to look. TG Daily has just published an article partially
based on a presentation they were tipped off about, and which was
uploaded on the 26th of April. It reveals a substantial amount of new
information, which we will not focus on analysing right now, so we do
encourage you to read it for yourself.

Page 1 discusses the possibility that Larrabee is a joint effort
between NVIDIA and Intel, which we find unlikely, and is possibly just
a misinterpretation of the recently announced patent licensing
agreement between the two companies. Page 2 is much more interesting
however, as they link to the presentation above and also uncover the
hidden Larrabee PCB diagram on slide 16.

We would tend not to agree with most of the analysis and speculation
provided by TG Daily, but it's still worth a good read along with the
presentation, which we are very glad they uncovered. Especially
interesting are slides 16, 17, 19, 24 and 31. That last one includes
some very interesting and previously unknown information on Intel's
upcoming Gesher CPU architecture (aka Sandy Bridge), which is aimed at
the 32nm node in the 2010 timeframe. Larrabee, on the other hand, will
presumably be manufactured on Intel's 45nm process but sport a larger
die size.


http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32282/137/


Intel set to announce graphics partnership with Nvidia?

By Wolfgang Gruener, Darren Polkowski
Friday, June 01, 2007 01:26


Chicago (IL) - Intel may soon be announcing a close relationship with
Nvidia, which apparently will be contributing to the company's
Larrabee project, TG Daily has learned. Larrabee is expected to roll
out in 2009 and debut as a floating point accelerator product with a
performance of more than 1 TFlops as well as a high-end graphics card
with dual-graphics capabilities.

Rumors about Intel's Larrabee processor have been floating around for
more than a year. Especially since the product's official announcement
at this year's spring IDF and an accelerating interest in floating
point accelerators, the topic itself and surrounding rumors are
gaining traction every day.

Industry sources told TG Daily that Intel is preparing a "big"
announcement involving technologies that will be key to develop
Larrabee. And at least some of those technologies may actually be
coming from Nvidia, we hear: Our sources described Larrabee as a
"joint effort" between the two companies, which may expand over time.
A scenario in which Intel may work with Nvidia to develop Intel-
tailored discrete graphics solutions is speculation but is considered
to be a likely relationship between the two companies down the road.
Clearly, Intel and Nvidia are thinking well beyond their cross-
licensing agreements that are in place today.

It is unclear when the collaboration will be announced; however,
details could surface as early as June 26, when the International
Supercomputing Conference 2007 will open its doors in Dresden,
Germany.

Asked about a possible announcement with Intel, Nvidia spokesperson
Ken Brown provided us with a brief statement: "We enjoy a good working
relationship with Intel and have agreements and ongoing engineering
activities as a result. This said, we cannot comment further about
items that are covered by confidentiality agreements between Intel and
Nvidia."

Intel replied to our inquiry by saying that the company does "not
comment on rumors and speculation."



The AMD-ATI and Intel-Nvidia thingy

In the light of the AMD-ATI merger, it is only to be expected that the
relationship between Intel and Nvidia is examined on an ongoing basis.
So, what does a closer relationship between Intel and Nvidia mean?

The combination with ATI enabled AMD to grow into a different class of
company. It evolved from being CPU-focused into a platform company
that not only can match some key technologies of Intel, but at least
for now has an edge in areas such as visualization capabilities. At a
recent press briefing, the company showed off some of its ideas and it
was clear to us that especially the area of general purpose GPUs will
pave the way to a whole new world of enterprise and desktop
computing.

Nvidia is taking a similar approach with its CUDA software interface,
which allows developers to take advantage of the (general purpose)
floating point horsepower of Geforce 8 graphics processors - more than
500 GFlops per chip. Intel's Larrabee processor is also aimed at
applications that benefit from floating point acceleration - such as
physics, enhanced AI and ray tracing.

While it has been speculated that Intel may be creating Larrabee with
an IA CPU architecture, we were told there may be more GPU elements in
this processor than we previously had thought. A Larrabee card with a
(general purpose) graphics processing unit will support CPUs in
applications that at least partially benefit from massively parallel
processing (as opposed to the traditional sequential processing); in
gaming, the Larrabee processor can be used for physics processing, for
example.

An imminent collaboration announcement between Intel and Nvidia, which
reminds us of a recent Digitimes story that claimed Nvidia was trading
technologies with Intel, of course, raises the question how close the
relationship between Intel and Nvidia might be. It also raises the
question, once again, if Intel may actually be interested in buying
Nvidia - which could make a whole lot of sense for Intel, but appears
to be rather unlikely at this time. Nvidia could cost Intel more than
$15 billion, given the firm's current market cap of $12.6 billion, and
the talk in Silicon Valley indicates that Nvidia co-founder and CEO
Jen-Hsun Huang isn't really interested in selling the company.

But a deal with Intel, involving the licensing of technologies or even
supply of GPUs could have a huge impact on Nvidia's bottom line and
catapult the company into a new phase of growth. However, a closer
collaboration could be important for Intel as well: AMD's acquisition
of ATI was not a measure to raise the stakes in the graphics market or
to battle Nvidia; it was a move to compete in the future CPU market -
with Intel. Having Nvidia on board provides Intel with a graphics
advantage, at least from today's point of view, and could allow the
company to more easily access advanced graphics technology down the
road.



What we know about Larrabee

Intel has recently shared more information with the public about its
intents in the realm of general purpose GPU (GPGPU). In a presentation
from March 7 of this year, Intel discussed its data parallelism
programming implementation called Ct. The presentation discusses the
use of flat vectors and very large instruction words (VLIW as utilized
in ATI/AMD's R600). In essence, the Ct application programming
language (API) bridges the gap of allowing it to work with existing
legacy APIs and libraries as well as co-exist with current
multiprocessing APIs (Pthreads and OpenMP), yet provides "extended
functionality to address irregular algorithms."

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/stories/article_images/intel_roadmap/larrabee_board.gif

There are several things to point out from the image above, which is a
block diagram of a board utilizing Larrabee. First is the PCIe 2.0
interface with the system. Intel is currently testing PCIe 2.0 as part
of the Bearlake-X (Beachwood) chipset (commercial name: X38), which
could be coming out as part of the Wolfdale 45 nm processor rollout
late this year or early in 2008. Larrabee won't arrive until 2009, but
our sources indicate that if you buy an X38-based board, you will be
able to run a Larrabee board in such a system.

In the upper right hand corner the power connections indicate 150
watts and 75 watts. These correspond to 8-pin and 6-pin power
connections that we have seen on the recent ATI HD2900XT. Intel
expects the power consumption of such a board to be higher than 150
watts. There are video outputs to the far left and as well as video
in. Larrabee appears to have VIVO functionality as well as HDMI output
based on the audio-in block seen at the top left.
A set of BSI connections are next to the audio in connection. We are
not positive on what the abbreviation stands for but we speculate that
these are connections for using these cards in parallel like ATI's
Crossfire or Nvidia's SLI technologies. Finally, there is the size of
the processor (package). That is over twice the size of current GPUs
as ATI's R600 is roughly 21 mm by 20 mm (420 mm=B2). Intel describes the
chip as a "discrete high end GPU" on a general purpose platform, using
at least 16 cores and providing a "fully programmable performance of 1
TFlops."

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/stories/article_images/intel_roadmap/larrabee1.gif


Moving on we can see that Larrabee will be based on a multi-SIMD
configuration. From other discussions about the chip across the net,
it would seem that each is scalar that works using Vec16 instructions.
That would mean that, for graphics applications, it could work on
blocks of 2x2 pixels at a time. These "in-Order" execution SIMDs will
have floating point 16 (FP16) precision as outlined by IEEE754. Also
to note is the use of a ring memory architecture. From a presentation
by Intel Chief Architect Ed Davis called "tera Tera Tera", Davis
outlines that the internal bandwidth on the bus will be 256 B/cycle
and the external memory will have a bandwidth of 128 GB/s. This is
extremely fast and achievable based on the 1.7-2.5 GHz projections for
the core frequency. Attached to each core will be some form of
texturing unit as well as a dynamically partitioned cache and ring
stop on the memory ring.

In the final image below you will notice that each device will have a
17 GB/s of bandwidth per link. These links tie into a next generation
Southbridge titled "ICH-n" as this is yet to be determined. From
discussions with those in the industry, it would appear that the
external memory might not be soldered into the board but in fact be
plug in modules. The slide denotes DDR3, GDDR, as well as FBD or fully
buffered DIMMs. It will be interesting to see what form this will
actually be implemented as but that is the fun of speculation.

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/stories/article_images/intel_roadmap/larrabee3.jpg





The current layout of project Larrabee is a deviation of previous
Intel roadmap targets. In a 2005 whitepaper entitled "Platform 2015:
Intel Processor and Platform Evolution for the Next Decade", the
company outlines a series of Xscale processors based on Explicitly
Parallel Instruction Computing or EPIC. Intel has deviated slightly
from its initial roadmap since the release of this paper: Intel sold
Xscale to Marvell last year, which makes it a rather unlikely product
for Larrabee - and could have opened up the discussion for other
processing units.

What is interesting is that rumors that Intel was looking for talent
for an upcoming "project" involving graphics started passing around
already more than a year and a half ago. In August of last year, you
could apply for positions on Career Builder and Intel's own website. A
current generic job description exists on Intel's website.



Concluding note

While this is an interesting approach to graphics, physics, and
general purpose processing, we will be seeing the meat in the final
product as well as the success of acceptance with independent software
vendors (ISVs). In our opinion, the concept of the GPGPU is the most
significant development in the computer environment in at least 15
years. The topic has been gaining ground lately and this new
implementation from Intel could take things to a whole new level. As
for the graphics performance, only time will tell.

It will be interesting to see which role Nvidia will play in Intel's
strategy. Keep a close eye on this one.

[Daneel Olivaw]

Most of this sounds fake. Esp the block diagrams.

Obviously Nv and Intel may deal with one another but these 'articles' sound like bad fiction.

[buffbiff21]

man you bastards didn't even see my other obscure post somewhere on these boards? :p

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20070507PD208.html

[Ancient]

Most of this sounds fake. Esp the block diagrams.

Obviously Nv and Intel may deal with one another but these 'articles' sound like bad fiction.
I think the article is straight up.

It's no secret that AMD's acquisition of ATi was done in order to develop a computer-on-a-chip technology. This presentation is part of Intel's counterpunch. AMD's grand plan may not pan out but if it does Intel has to be ready with their own version or, if AMD produces something amazing, potentially lose their dominance of the computing market.

[AirRaid]

could be fake, or *some* of it could be wrong, Yet often mega-rumors come true. nobody would've believed AMD would buy ATI a few years ago.

more:


Intel and Nvidia: grand graphics alliance?

Will Intel be teaming up with Nvidia over Larrabee?


Intel and Nvidia: grand graphics alliance?
More details of the mysterious Larrabee project emerge
Dan Grabham
05 Jun 2007 17:03

Could Intel and Nvidia be preparing to unveil a grand PC graphics technology alliance? That's the latest rumour following the release of further details of Intel's in-house graphics project, known as Larrabee. But is it true?

As we reported back in April, Larrabee is an all-new processor design from Intel that is due out in 2009 and majors on floating point power. Larrabee processors are expected to come in several forms including a dedicated graphics processing chip.

However, according to website TGDaily , Intel will actually be teaming up with Californian graphics company Nvidia to produce the new chip. Engineering work for the new processor will be shared between the two companies.

Intel's engineers will design the floating point units used for shader calculations while Nvidia will supply the circuitry required to rasterise and output graphics.

Intel and Nvidia already have an existing patent cross-licensing agreement, so closer co-operation between the two companies is certainly plausible. Especially in the context of the recent acquisition of Canadians graphics outfit by Intel's main rival AMD .

In any case, TGDaily has certainly stumbled upon some interesting new facts regarding Larrabee. In a document recently released but not widely publicised, Intel confirms the Larrabee project will initially give birth to two chips.

The first is the aforementioned graphics chip composed of 16 Larrabee cores and a slew of dedicated 3D output hardware and video memory. This flavour of the Larrabee processor will reside on an add-in board just like existing graphics cards. In other words, it will go head to head against high performance video boards from Nvidia and ATI.

The second design is a so-called general purpose chip that will be capable of running the full x86 instruction set. However, with a total of 24 cores, it will deliver truly mind-bending floating point power - as much as one trillion floating point operations per second.

Incredibly, that's approximately 40 times the floating point power of an existing Intel Core 2 dual-core processor. This version of Larrabee probably isn't suited to all-round desktop processing. Intel has another, completely separate road map of Core 2-based chips to cater for that market.

But for specialist applications such medical calculations, for example protein folding à la Folding at Home, and perhaps even high-end gaming with sophisticated physics simulations, Larrabee will be a very interesting indeed.


http://tinyurl.com/2hxmct

[AirRaid]

Intel's Larrabee: A killer blow for AMD

Could Larrabee mean another tortuous time for AMD?

tech.co.uk staff
Thursday 07 June 2007 16:19

It's a silly sounding name, Larrabee. But it must fill AMD 's heart with terror. It's the codename, of course, for a whole family of new processors being cooked up by Intel . And it promises to add graphics insult to AMD's existing CPU injuries.

Frankly, things are bad enough for AMD already. Since launch last summer, the Core 2 processor has been pistol whipping AMD's Athlon CPUs into burger meat. Meanwhile, AMD's upcoming quad-core competitor, broadly known as Barcelona, looks like a pretty unambitious effort. It will certainly have to be some chip to take on Intel's upcoming 45nm die shrink of the Core 2 chip. Factor in recent reports of a launch delay for Barcelona and I'm beginning to get the fear about AMD's ability to compete.

Then there's the spectacular fashion in which the wheels have come off AMD's recently acquired ATI graphics subsidiary. ATI's all new flagship graphics DX10 board, the Radeon HD 2900 XT was very late, extremely underwhelming on arrival and possibly a bit broken. The midrange variants of the Radeon HD range don't look much healthier: they've been sent back to the fab for a respin. Not a good sign.

In that context, the emergence of the Larrabee project from Intel is just further proof of how far ahead of the game Intel appears to be at moment. For the uninitiated, Larrabee is an all new multi-core processor design that majors on floating point power.
The full feature set hasn't been revealed as yet, but an official Intel document turned up on a university website recently that reveals several fascinating new details.

Try these specs for size. Larrabee will be available in configurations ranging from 16 to 24 with clock speeds as high as 2GHz and raw performance in the 1TFlop range. The latter figure is approximately 40 times more than an existing Intel Core 2 Duo chip. Yup, you read it right. 40 times. And the first Larrabee chips are pencilled in for as soon as 2009.

Of course, floating point power is just one part of the overall PC processing equation - Intel will be retaining a conventional CPU roadmap for general purpose duties based on the existing Core 2 family.

But Larrabee will take Intel into brand new markets. Significantly, the document confirmed that a variant with full 3D video rendering capability is on the cards. As we reported earlier this week, the rumblings on the rumour mill suggest the chip could be a joint effort with Nvidia.

Either way, the most fascinating aspect of the Larrabee GPU is the expectation that it could be the first graphics processor to combine both traditional raster graphics with more advanced ray-tracing techniques.

Without getting bogged down in the details, suffice to understand that raster graphics are a bit of a kludge when it comes to simulating lighting. Ray-tracing is the real deal. Ask any 3D graphics professional what they think about ray tracing on GPUs and they'll tell it's a matter of when rather than if.

Of course, AMD and ATI will know perfectly well that ray tracing is the future. But what must be really worrying is that it presents Intel with the perfect inflection point to enter the graphics market. ATI and Nvidia have refined raster graphics to the point where other companies, including Intel, simply can't compete. But a new age of ray-traced graphics will level the playing field and might just hand Intel a chance for the total domination of the PC platform it so dearly desires. Jeremy Laird

http://www.tech.co.uk/dangrabham/general/blogs/2007/06/07/intels-larrabee-a-killer-blow-for-amd

[Madpistol]

A lot of this stuff sounds like speculation, and some of the figures that these guys are throwing out sound downright insane. However, if this is where we're going, we're in for one hell of a ride over the next few years.

Also... WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED TO COMPUTERS OVER THE LAST 6 MONTHS???? Intel sounds like they're cooking up a monopoly in the processor world.

[AirRaid]

http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10005497o-2000331777b,00.htm


Intel Larrabee roadmap -- who says there ain't no Santa Cores?
Posted by Rupert Goodwins

More news is leaking out about Larrabee, Intel's many-core x86 project. According to what Google translates as Hiroshige's Goto Weekly from Japan, there'll be 24 and 32 core variants out in 2009 and a 48 core chip in 2010. The 24 core variant may even be the 32 core version in disguise, as a way to ship useful parts when one or more cores don't work.

Picking my way carefully through the Googleised Japanese, it appears that the first product Larrabee may appear in is a PCI Express 2 accelerator card - mostly for graphics, but with plenty of other options for tasks that like lots of high speed floating point. That's where most of the x86 instruction set enhancements will come too, together with specialised parallel control instructions. That makes for interesting comparisons with IBM's Cell, which has a conventional Power PC core doing control and housekeeping and entirely incompatible processor units managing the heavy lifting.

Oh, and please not to be confusing the Larrabee with the Polaris, Intel's other public many-core chip. Polaris is not x86, it's not going to be a product, it's a testbed and, aside from having lots of cores (80, as opposed to Larrabee's 24-48) there's not much similarity. Polaris uses a cross-switch matrix for core interconnection, Larrabee a 256-byte-per-cycle ring; Polaris has stacked memory, Larrabee multiple on-chip DRAM controllers (as far as I can tell)...

[AirRaid]

Intel Larrabee set for release in 2010
Friday 22nd June 2007, 06:40:00 PM, written by Arun

Information Week reports that during a conference at their headquarters, Intel spoke to analysts and reporters about their future energy-efficient products, including Larrabee and wireless solutions. Justin Rattner, Intel's CTO, also noted that Larrabee will be their "first tera-scale processor" and that it is aimed at a 2010 release, or possibly 2009 if things go especially smoothly.

Justin also reiterated that Larrabee will deliver "well in excess" of one teraflop of processing power. The company stressed the importance of their "path finding" process: previously, product development engineers were pretty much on their own guessing what design decisions made the most sense for the target timeframe. In the company''s newest initiatives, such as Tera-Scale, researchers and product development people are working much closer together. The researchers are also responsible for finding "the best use for newly developed technology in products".

The fact that Larrabee (or presumably, its first silicon implementation, as the codename often seems to refer to the architecture and all its potential derivatives) seems now more likely to be released in 2010 (or very late 2009) rather than early 2009 brings up a number of interesting questions, such as what process it will be manufactured on and what NVIDIA and AMD's products will bring to the table in that timeframe.

In terms of process technology, the 32nm shrink of the Nehalem architecture (aka Westmere) is aimed at a 2H 2009 release, and most likely Q4. If Larrabee comes out after that, it would make sense to presume that it will also be manufactured on 32nm. Furthermore, if it wasn't, Intel would actually be at a process disadvantage in that timeframe: NVIDIA and ATI are likely to be on the 40nm half-node at TSMC, while Intel would only be on 45nm. As such, this question is of keen importance, as it will determine much of the future competitivity of the initial implementation of the Larrabee architecture.

However, given that Larrabee has been compared with Gesher (aka Sandy Bridge, which is a 32nm chip) in a recent Intel presentation, it is far from impossible to imagine it will be produced on the same process. Finally, in terms of competing products, this most likely implies that Larrabee will directly compete with NVIDIA and ATI''s true next-gen architectures, rather than with loose derivatives of the G80 and R600. No matter what these new architectures will be called (G100 and R800?), they will certainly be very different from today's, and that makes it much more difficult to predict how Larrabee will compare to the competition.

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/297

[breathemetal]

Intel owns hardware like Google owns the internet...

...really...Google owns the internet...


(sofahide)

[AngelGraves13]

Nice! Can't wait for this beast! Maybe ray-tracing games will be possible by 2010.

[PiXeL67]

Nice! Can't wait for this beast! Maybe ray-tracing games will be possible by 2010.
2010... Maybe. What version of DirectX or OpenGL will support all this goodness? We are still waiting for the first game that really takes advantage of multi-core processors, 64 bit OS, and DX10! So...go ahead Intelevidia. Release the Septacore 62000 even though the software won't be available for eons.

What the industry really needs IMO is a way to synch hardware and software tech so we can get it to market faster... How about a PS360 that is actually upgradable? This would be more economical than rebuilding my PC every other year. Not that I don't love my new system because I do, but it sure would be cool to simply plug in more memory to my PS3 or upgrade the GPU by inserting a new MXM module.

I can dream...