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Intel Details Nehalem CPU and Larrabee GPU

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Mar 17, 2008 05:34 PM
from the business-is-war dept.
Intel Hardware
Vigile writes "Intel previewed the information set to be released at IDF next month including details on a wide array of technology for server, workstation, desktop and graphics chips. The upcoming Tukwila chip will replace the current Itanium lineup with about twice the performance at a cost of 2 billion transistors and Dunnington is a hexa-core processor using existing Core 2 architecture. Details of Nehalem, Intel's next desktop CPU core that includes an integrated memory controller, show a return of HyperThreading-like SMT, a new SSE 4.2 extension and modular design that features optional integrated graphics on the CPU as well. Could Intel beat AMD in its own "Fusion" plans? Finally, Larrabee, the GPU technology Intel is building, was verified to support OpenGL and DirectX upon release and Intel provided information on a new extension called Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) for SSE that would improve graphics performance on the many-core architecture."
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Submission: Intel details Nehalem CPU and Larrabee GPU by Vigile (99919)
[+] Larrabee Team Is Focused On Rasterization 87 comments
Vigile writes "Tom Forsyth, a well respected developer inside Intel's Larrabee project, has spoken to dispel rumors that the Larrabee architecture is ignoring rasterization, and in fact claims that the new GPU will perform very well with current DirectX and OpenGL titles. The recent debate between rasterization and ray tracing in the world of PC games has really been culminating around the pending arrival of Intel's discrete Larrabee GPU technology. Game industry luminaries like John Carmack, Tim Sweeney and Cevat Yerli have chimed in on the discussion saying that ray tracing being accepted as the primary rendering method for games is unlikely in the next five years."
[+] Intel Lynnfield CPU Bests Nehalem In Performance/Watt 173 comments
Vigile writes "Not many people have debated that Intel's Nehalem architecture is the fastest available for consumer desktop computers since it was released last year, but quite a few have complained about the cost of the platform. Intel just released new Lynnfield-based processors under both the Core i7 and Core i5 names and tests are showing the new CPUs beating Nehalem in both performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar tests to a startling degree. And while raw performance probably still goes to the Nehalem-based Core i7 CPUs, the lower prices of motherboards and memory for Lynnfield processors will likely more than make up for it." Update: 09/08 14:03 GMT by T : There are more eye-wateringly exhaustive examinations of the new chips all over the Web; here's HotHardware's version, and Tom's Hardware's.
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Intel Details Nehalem CPU and Larrabee GPU 50 Comments More /

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  • Heck, I remember when "Pentium" came out and people laughed

    • Re:Nehalem? Larrabee? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TechyImmigrant (175943) * on Monday March 17 2008, @05:38PM (#22778270) Journal
      They are code names, not product names.

      Intel has a rich collection of silly code names.

      • Re:Nehalem? Larrabee? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Naughty Bob (1004174) on Monday March 17 2008, @05:47PM (#22778330)
        I vote AMD hit back with "Orgo" and "Ftoomsh"

      • Re:Nehalem? Larrabee? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Have Blue (616) on Monday March 17 2008, @06:12PM (#22778514) Homepage
        Most of Intel's codenames are names of real places [wikipedia.org].

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Most of Intel's codenames are names of real places.

          How long until they release a chip named after Intercourse,PA,
          Or my favourite, Wankers Corner,OR

          AMD will join the fun and look to France for inspirational place names, such as Condom, Tampon and Herpes

          Not to be outdone, poor old Amiga Inc finally release a new computer named after the village of Shittington,in the UK,with an update scheduled for 2025 named after Mount Buggery in Australia.
      • Larrabee has been around for ages. I remember how in Get Smart he worked for Control, but in the end he quit to join IBM. Now we find him again, this time at Intel. I think I'm having another one of those headaches again.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by glitch23 (557124)
        They typically (maybe all) come from various types of things (e.g. mountains [mckinley]) in the north west portion of North America. You'll notice many sound the same such as Tukwila and Willamette.

    • Re:Nehalem? Larrabee? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by slew (2918) on Monday March 17 2008, @05:59PM (#22778410)

      Nehalem? Larrabee?
      Heck, I remember when "Pentium" came out and people laughed

      Heck, I remember when "Itanium" came out and people laughed...

      But before they laughed, I remember a bunch of companies folded up their project tents (sun, mips, the remains of dec/alpha). I'm not so sure companies will do the same this time around... Not saying this time Intel doesn't have their ducks in a row, but certainly, the past is no indication of the future...

      • Re:Nehalem? Larrabee? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday March 17 2008, @06:34PM (#22778686) Homepage Journal

        But before they laughed, I remember a bunch of companies folded up their project tents (sun, mips,
        I think you are mistaken. MIPS still exists, but SGI stopped using it. HP killed both PA RISC and Alpha, but they co-developed Itanium, so it isn't entirely surprising. Sun kept developing chips, and currently hold the performance-per-watt crown for a lot of common web-server tasks.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kamokazi (1080091)
      These are code names, not product names. They will probably all be Core 2(3?), Xeon, etc.

  • Intel Vs. AMD? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Naughty Bob (1004174) on Monday March 17 2008, @05:38PM (#22778268)

    Could Intel beat AMD in its own "Fusion" plans?
    Intel is hugely advanced on AMD at this point, however, without AMD we wouldn't be seeing these releases. Hurray for the market, I guess....

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by WarJolt (990309)
      Intel has expensive really fast multi core processors.
      AMD 64-bit processing is better. Depending on the type of processing you're doing that could mean a lot.
      We all know what a debacle Intels integrated graphics were in the past. I'm not sure if they should be using that as a marketing point.
      Since AMD acquired ATI I would assume AMDs integrated graphics would be far superior.

      NVIDIAs stock price hasn't been doing so good in the last couple months. Could this mean a return of integrated graphics? I'd bet my m
      • I am nobody's fanboy, but I kinda believe that if/when the transition to 64-bit picks up speed, Intel would miraculously produce something fairly crushing.

        Your post makes me think that Intel will attempt a take-over of Nvidia, hostile or otherwise. But I have no knowledge in this area.

        • Re:Intel Vs. AMD? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by eggnoglatte (1047660) on Monday March 17 2008, @06:15PM (#22778534)

          Your post makes me think that Intel will attempt a take-over of Nvidia, hostile or otherwise. But I have no knowledge in this area.
          Why would they? Intel already has the biggest GPU marketshare (bout 50% or so), and they achieve that with integrated graphics, that are arguably the way of the future. My guess is that NVIDIA will become the SGI of the early 21st century - they'll cater to a high-speed niche market. Too bad, actually, I kind of like their cards (and they have by far the best 3D Linux performance).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Joe The Dragon (967727)
      But AMD has better on board video and there new chipset can use side port ram.

      Video on the cpu may be faster but you are still useing the same system ram and that is not as fast that ram on a video card and that ram it on it's own.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Naughty Bob (1004174)

        Video on the cpu may be faster but you are still using the same system ram and that is not as fast that ram on a video card and that ram it on it's own.

        Nobody could argue against that, but the two approaches solve different problems currently. If the drift is towards an all in one solution, then the drift is towards less capable, but cheaper tech. Most gamers are console gamers, perhaps the chip makers are coming to the conclusion that dedicated GPUs for the PC are a blind alley (a shame IMHO).

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Joe The Dragon (967727)
          With things like vista do you really want to give up 128-256 of system ram + the bandwidth need for that just for areo? The on chip video should have side port ram like the new amd chip can use or maybe have 32meg+ of on chip ram / cache for video. Just having a ddr 2/3 slot or slots with there own channels will be better then useing the same ones that are justed for system ram but ram on video cards is faster then that.

          also console games don't have mod's / users maps and other add ones they also don't have
          • I just don't think the lack of side port ram is a deal breaker is all. It would be nice, but system ram is cheap, and it looks like the cool developments are in other directions. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

            True enough about the restricted nature of console gaming, but don't expect that to inform 'Big Silicon' in its future decisions. Money is their only friend.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 0111 1110 (518466)

      without AMD we wouldn't be seeing these releases.

      Actually this seems a bit disingenuous to me. Intel released Penryn way before they had to. Intel (the hare) was so far ahead of AMD (the tortoise) with the 65nm Core 2 that they could have sat back and relaxed for a while, saving R&D costs while waiting for AMD to catch up at least a little. I mean look at Nvidia for a perfect counterexample. Most people believe that they already have a next gen GPU ready but that they are sitting on it until they have someone to compete with besides themselves. To a

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Naughty Bob (1004174)
        It is only about the money. All decisions ultimately come back to that. With Penryn, huge fabricating plants were coming online, and they couldn't have justified (to shareholders) not following through. That it kept Intel's jackboot firmly on the AMD windpipe was in that instance a happy sweetener.
      • Actually this seems a bit disingenuous to me. Intel released Penryn way before they had to. Intel (the hare) was so far ahead of AMD (the tortoise) with the 65nm Core 2 that they could have sat back and relaxed for a while, saving R&D costs while waiting for AMD to catch up at least a little. I mean look at Nvidia for a perfect counterexample. Most people believe that they already have a next gen GPU ready but that they are sitting on it until they have someone to compete with besides themselves.

        There

  • So, this Larrabee, will it be another example of integrated graphics that "supports" all the standards while being too slow to be useful in any practical situation, even basic desktop acceleration (Composite / Aero)? If so, I've gotta wonder why they even bother rather than saving some cash and just making a solid 2D accelerator that would be for all intents and purposes functionally identical.

    • Re:More Integrated Garbage? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kamokazi (1080091) on Monday March 17 2008, @06:19PM (#22778566)
      No, far, far, from integrated garbage. Larrabee will actually have uses as a supercomputer CPU:

      "It was clear from Gelsinger's public statements at IDF and from Intel's prior closed-door presentations that the company intends to see the Larrabee architecture find uses in the supercomputing market, but it wasn't so clear that this new many-core architecture would ever see the light of day as an enthusiast GPU. This lack of clarity prompted me to speculate that Larrabee might never yield a GPU product, and others went so far as to report "Larrabee is GPGPU-only" as fact.

      Subsequent to my IDF coverage, however, I was contacted by a few people who have more intimate knowledge of the project than I. These folks assured me that Intel definitely intends to release a straight-up enthusiast GPU part based on the Larrabee architecture. So while Intel won't publicly talk about any actual products that will arise from the project, it's clear that a GPU aimed at real-time 3D rendering for games will be among the first public fruits of Larrabee, with non-graphics products following later.

      As for what type of GPU Larrabee will be, it's probably going to have important similarities to we're seeing out of NVIDIA with the G80. Contrary to what's implied in this Inquirer article, GPU-accelerated raster graphics are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and they won't be replaced by real-time ray-tracing engines. Actually, it's worthwhile to take a moment to look at this issue in more detail."

      Shamelessly ripped from:

      http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/clearing-up-the-confusion-over-intels-larrabee.ars/2 [arstechnica.com]
       
      • You can also see the validity of, but debate around, Larrabee here in an interview with John Carmack: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/12/1918250&from=rss [slashdot.org]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by donglekey (124433)
        Very interesting and I think you are right on the money. 'Graphics' is accelerated now, but the future may be more about generalized stream computing that can be used for graphics (or physics, or sound, etc) similar to the G80 and even the PS3's Cell (they originally were going to try to use it to avoid having a graphics card at all). This is why John Carmack thinks volumetrics may have a place in future games, why David Kirk thinks that some ray tracing could be used (not much, but don't worry it wouldn'

    • Ummmmm, no (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Monday March 17 2008, @06:26PM (#22778620)
      First off, new integrated Intel chipsets do just find for desktop acceleration. One of our professors got a laptop with an X3000 chip and it does quite well in Vista. All the eye candy works and is plenty snappy.

      However, this will be much faster since it fixes a major problem with integrated graphics: Shared RAM. All integrated Intel chipsets nab system RAM to work. Makes sense, this keeps costs down and that is the whole idea behind them. The problem is it is slow. System RAM is much slower than video RAM. As an example, high end systems might have a theoretical max RAM bandwidth of 10GB/sec if they have the latest DDR3. In reality, it is going to be more along the lines of 5GB/sec in systems that have integrated graphics. A high end graphics card can have 10 TIMES that. The 8800 Ultra has a theoretical bandwidth over 100GB/sec.

      Well, in addition to the RAM not being as fast, the GPU has to fight with the CPU for access to it. All in all, it means that RAM access is just not fast for the GPU. That is a major limiting factor in modern graphics. Pushing all those pixels with multiple passes of textures takes some serious memory bandwidth. No problem for a discrete card, of course, it'll have it's own RAM just like any other.

      In addition to that, it looks like they are putting some real beefy processing power on this thing.

      As such I expect this will perform quite well. Will it do as good as the offerings from nVidia or ATi? Who knows? But this clearly isn't just an integrated chip on a board.
    • Larrabee could be more of a hedge against IBMs Cell and Nvidia's GPUs for high computational workloads. The addition of graphics being a page from Nvidias book to try and get gamers to fund their HPC conquests.

  • HyperThreading (Score:3, Interesting)

    by owlstead (636356) on Monday March 17 2008, @06:19PM (#22778568)
    "Also as noted, a return to SMT is going to follow Nehalem to the market with each core able to work on two software threads simultaneously. The SMT in Nehalem should be more efficient that the HyperThreading we saw in NetBurst thanks to the larger caches and lower latency memory system of the new architecture."

    Gosh, I hope it is more effective, because in my implementations I actually saw a slowdown instead of an advantage. Even then I'm generally not happy with hyper-threading. The OS & Applications simply don't see the difference between two real cores and a hyperthreading core. If I run another thread on a hyperthreading core, I'll slowdown the other thread. This might not always be what you want to see happening. IMHO, the advantage should be over 10/20% for a desktop processor to even consider hyperthreading, and even then I want back that BIOS option so that disables hyperthreading again.

    I've checked and both the Linux and Vista kernel support a large number of cores, so that should not be a problem.

    Does anyone have any information on how well the multi-threading works on the multi-core Sun niagara based processors?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jd (1658)
      This is why I think it would be better to have virtual cores and physical hyperthreading. You have as many compute elements as possible, all of which are available to all virtual cores. The number of virtual cores presented could be set equal to the number of threads available, equal to the number of register sets the processor could describe in internal memory, or to some number decided by some other aspect of the design. Each core would see all compute elements, and would use them as needed for out-of-ord
  • While these processors may end up being great, in the end they may very well push AMD over the edge if you consider that AMD's new processors get clobbered by Intel's old processors. In the end, unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of their hat by the end of the year, this may either be the last innovation Intel makes for a while, or the last affordable one. As consumers we owe AMD a vote of thanks for driving Intel to the level they are at now.
  • I can't even find the clock speed in that article, which means we're STILL probably stuck at 3.5 Ghz +/- .5 Ghz, which we've been stuck for what, three, four years? What the hell happened? If we're still shrinking components, why are we not seeing clock speed increases?

    • Re:Why the brick wall? (Score:5, Informative)

      by djohnsto (133220) <dan.e.johnston@NosPaM.gmail.com> on Monday March 17 2008, @06:49PM (#22778772) Homepage
      Because power generally increases at a rate of frequency^3 (that's cubed). Adding more cores generally increases power linearly.

      For example. Let's start with a single-core Core 2 @ 2GHz. Let's say it uses 10 W (not sure what the actual number is).

      Running it at twice the frequency results in a (2^3) = 8X power increase. So, we can either have a single-core 4 GHz Core 2 at 80W, or we can have a quad-core 2GHz Core 2 at 40W. Which one makes more sense?

    • Re:Why the brick wall? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheSync (5291) * on Monday March 17 2008, @07:39PM (#22779102) Homepage Journal
      1) We've hit the "Power Wall", power is expensive, but transistors are "free". That is, we can put more transistors on a chip than we have the power to turn on.

      2) We also have hit the "Memory Wall", modern microprocessors can take 200 clocks to access DRAM, but even floating-point multiplies may take only four clock cycles.

      3) Because of this, processor performance gain has slowed dramatically. In 2006, performance is a factor of three below the traditional doubling every 18 months that occurred between 1986 and 2002.

      To understand where we are, and why the only way to go now is parallelism versus clock speed increase, see The Landscape of Parallel Computing ReseView from Berkeley [berkeley.edu].

  • ... because I simply _don't_ trust any company/companies with market share as vast as Intel (yeah, I know, the "Traitorous Eight" [wikipedia.org]). Apparently, AMD has had a lot of legal beef with Intel in the past, in fact, they used to be best buds, until Intel snaked AMD from some business with IBM. I know it's only a matter of time before Intel outwits AMD in the mass sales of proc.'s (esp. in the desktop/laptop field... I personally LOVE the power-saving on my Dual-Core... 3.5 Hrs avg. on a battery is GREAT for the po
  • While this new architecture sounds amazing, and I am planning to upgrade in about a year when this is released, is anyone else a bit worried about the overclocking potential of Nehalem? Intel sells their high end $1000 + 'Extreme' CPUs with an unlocked multiplier and, other than a higher bin, that is really its only selling point. I remember the days before Intel started locking down the multipliers. Lots of people thought it might spell the end of overclocking. But of course it turned out that FSB overcloc

  • The Giant is awakened (Score:3, Interesting)

    by markass530 (870112) <markass530@fas t m a i l .fm> on Monday March 17 2008, @08:05PM (#22779266) Homepage
    I say this, as an admitted AMD fanboy, and in hopes that they can make a comeback, to once again force intel into a frenzy of research and development. I Can't help but imagine that AMD exec's are saying something along the lines of Isoroku Yamamota's famous WWII post pearl harbor quote, "I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant." It's all gravy for consumers so one can't help to be happy at the current developments. However to ensure future happiness for consumers, one must also hope for an AMD Comeback.

    • Re:The Giant is awakened (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hal_Porter (817932) on Tuesday March 18 2008, @03:04AM (#22780914)
      I think AMD will do OK. Once Dell and the like get used to using CPUs from multiple sources they will probably survive. And a small company like AMD probably has an edge in terms of shorter design cycles and the ability to pick niches. AMD64 was a brilliant hack in retrospect that gave people most of the features of Itanium they wanted (64 bit, more registers) and none that they didn't (and expensive single source CPU with crap integer performance). Meanwhile Intel got hopeless bogged down trying to sell people Itaniums that they didn't want.

      AMD and they have other clever stuff in the pipeline. E.g.

      http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/upgrades-and-peripherals/motherboards-and-processors/news/amd-plots-16-core-super-cpu-for-2009?articleid=1754617439 [tech.co.uk]

      What's more, with that longer instruction pipeline in mind, it will be interesting to see how Bulldozer pulls off improved single-threaded performance. Rumours are currently circulating that Bulldozer may be capable of thread-fusing or using multiple cores to compute a single thread. Thread fusing is one of the holy grails of PC processing. If Bulldozer is indeed capable of such a feat, the future could be very bright indeed for AMD.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by trickonion (943942)
      I dont understand your comment, I, like many other people dont like the idea of TPM, and from your post it seems you are sarcastically agreeing with me. (via the word slipped). You also, however say so we can get the advantage of owning an expensive cable box (which I could actually see as an advantage, if you already have one in your house).
      Your post confuses me (or I'm being retarded, this has happened twice before in my life, along with the 3 times I've been wrong), and it forces me to conclude, that y
    • depends how you feel about an HP-UX set top box.
      me, personally, i'm all for it.
      others may disagree, and I respect that.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by pandrijeczko (588093)
          Apple probably buys around 10 percent of all laptop chips that Intel produces, and mostly goes for the more expensive ones, so I would estimate about 20 percent of dollar revenue.

          I notice you've tried to sneak in the adjective "laptop" in there. I think it would be erring on your side to suggest that no more than half the chips Intel produces are for laptops, the remaining being for desktop and servers. If your figures are correct (which I seriously doubt), then that puts Apple down to buying a maximum of

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