AnandTech: Intel’s Larrabee Architecture Disclosure
AnandTech has a great write-up with some early information on Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics architecture. While the details are mostly sketchy, the article does an excellent job of analysing what the future might hold and drawing parallels with existing AMD and NVIDIA products. It sounds quite promising in theory, and the HPC/GPGPU crowd in particular should be quite excited about the total programmability. The CPU has an extended x64 instruction set and 4-way SMT (aka HyperThreading), so how soon before mainstream OS's can make use of the forthcoming hybrid architectures?
I also wonder if Apple knows something that the rest of us don't, given their OpenCL proposal and claimed multi-threaded improvements on a massive scale for Snow Leopard. It's not like they don't have a history of working closely with Intel on upcoming products. Their installed base is just about manageable enough to try something really crazy and pull it off.
With 8-core Nehalem on the horizon, and massively data-parallel processors like Larrabee, we're quickly moving towards a heterogeneous NUMA architecture on your average desktop! (IBM already offers QS22 server blade based on the Cell BE.) Exciting times, no?
Source: AnandTech: Intel's Larrabee Architecture Disclosure: A Calculated First Move