Intel offers up more Larrabee details at GDC
Intel’s move into the discrete graphics market is inching closer to reality and the company wants to make sure the gaming industry is paying attention. To this end, the company is revealing at the Game Developers Conference today some additional details of its Larrabee graphics architecture that is aimed squarely at both Nvidia and AMD.
According to the chip maker, Larrabee will be a dramatic shift away from the shader processing designs used today by both major GPU vendors. It will feature a “many-core architecture” based on the original Pentium design with a new ring-bus-style interconnect for memory and coherent L2 cache across all cores. While Pentium processors are considered slow by today’s standards, Intel claims they become very fast and power efficient when you put a lot of them working in parallel on a single chip. And the fact that they support the current x86 instruction set reportedly makes Larrabee more flexible than a traditional graphics chip.
