Intel puts x64 in a parallel universe
We've all been wondering exactly what Intel would do with various multicore x64 processors that had been designed as co-processors to accelerate graphics and other applications with lots of number-crunching. The answer, as Intel explained at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany this week, is simple: Replace lots of standard Xeon processors commonly used in massively parallel supercomputers with many-cored systems on a chip and drop the whole idea of doing discrete graphics cards to compete against Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
At last fall's SC09 supercomputer trade show, Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, showed off an experimental graphics co-processor code-named "Larrabee," which was able to hit one teraflops running the SGEMM single precision, dense matrix multiply benchmark test when Intel turned on all the cores and then overclocked it for a short spike. But don't get too excited.
