Intel Details Nehalem CPU and Larrabee GPU

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."

Intel Vs. AMD?

[Naughty Bob (1004174)]

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:

[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:

[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:

[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:Intel Vs. AMD?

[eggnoglatte (1047660)]

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:Intel Vs. AMD?

[wild_berry (448019)]

Unreal founder Tim Sweeney says that Intel's integrated graphics are a real set-back for PC gaming (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/10/1239205 [slashdot.org]). Intel keep promising and failing to deliver substantive graphics performance (and even insisted on the 'Vista Capable' label being applicable to the Aero-incapable i915 graphics chipset to sell more of these chips - see http://slashdot.org/articles/08/03/01/1312233.shtml [slashdot.org] and http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/28/1746211&from=rss [slashdot.org]). AMD have released the 780G chipset which includes a Radeon HD2x00-class onboard graphics chip and which offers a good basic capability to play recent games.

More Integrated Garbage?

[immcintosh (1089551)]

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?

[Kamokazi (1080091)]

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]
 

Ummmmm, no

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

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.

HyperThreading

[owlstead (636356)]

"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:

[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

Re:Nehalem? Larrabee?

[TechyImmigrant (175943)]

They are code names, not product names.

Intel has a rich collection of silly code names.

Re:Nehalem? Larrabee?

[Naughty Bob (1004174)]

I vote AMD hit back with "Orgo" and "Ftoomsh"

Re:Nehalem? Larrabee?

[Have Blue (616)]

Most of Intel's codenames are names of real places [wikipedia.org].

Re:Nehalem? Larrabee?

[slew (2918)]

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?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

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:

[Kamokazi (1080091)]

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

Re:Gflargen and Blackeblae

[iknownuttin (1099999)]

Haven't they heard of numbers?

You can't trademark numbers. When AMD started releasing "x86" numbered processors, Intel filed suit and lost. The judge stated that you can't trademark numbers. It's such an old case, this is what I found in the last 10 minutes regarding Intel and trademarking numbers [theinquirer.net].

I'm tired and too lazy to find the actual lawsuit.

Re:

[ChronoReverse (858838)]

Well, it went from Core, to Core 2. I'd presume these new chips would get the "Core 3" moniker.

Re:Gflargen and Blackeblae

[tzot (834456)]

Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium 4 made it clear which one was newer (although the shift to arabic numerals was a little inconsistent).

Someone sent an email to the Intel board of directors, allegedly from CIA, beginning with "Dear Sirs: it has come to our attention that you label your products with arabic numerals."

It took them a while to get that it was a joke.

Re:Please stop naming after WA and OR places

[Itninja (937614)]

I vote for Skookumchuck [wikipedia.org].

Re:TPM

[Xtravar (725372)]

it forces me to conclude, that you, AC are in fact a woman and are using feminine wiles.

INTRUDER ALERT!!!! Sound the alarms!! We've got a code 159. Get me a traceroute, now!!!

Re:Why the brick wall?

[djohnsto (133220)]

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?

[TheSync (5291)]

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].

Re:The Giant is awakened

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

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.