IDF 2008: The Larrabee on top Posted on 20/08/2008 at 18:29 by Damien
At a round table conference, Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President of Intel’s Enterprise Group, clearly reaffirmed Intel’s ambitions for the Larrabee: to take the high end part of the GPU market. He also specified that this indeed involves surpassing the performances of Nvidia and AMD GPUs which will be available at that time – and this in Direct3D and OpenGL!
And obviously, this is where the biggest issue with the Larrabee lies because it involves a CPU emulating a GPU. Intel therefore does not seem to be worried about the performance levels of this emulation and moreover specifies that once used in native mode will quickly outdistance GPUs.
When asked about the Larrabee’s enormous announced energy consumption, Pat Gelsinger was very clear: it's a high end chip and it not supposed to be low power. We are in agreement with this even if it goes against current “green” trends and related problems (cooling) will have to be mastered as it is no longer acceptable that a high end product be overly noisy.
