
Intel presentation reveals the future of the CPU-GPU war - jonmc12
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/31/1
======
vizard
Intel has revealed a lot more about Larrabee since then. If you are interested
in GPGPU, you might want to check out the paper Intel presented at SIGGRAPH :
"Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing"

[http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/program/item/?type=p...](http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/program/item/?type=papers&id=34)

As a person currently working with both CUDA and the AMD Stream SDK, I am
pretty excited about Larrabee. If nothing else, I hope Intel will simply
provide better documentation and perhaps better software tools :|

------
wmf
Note that this article is over 18 months old.

------
kirse
Intel has to move in this direction because they can't get beat out by AMD and
their Fusion initiative.

Intel got absolutely spanked by the Athlon64 for ~5 years and they're not
about to repeat that again.

~~~
cjenkins
I remember reading through some Nehalem articles mentioning that Intel will
actually beat AMD to the CPU/GPU on the same package with AMD delaying Fusion.

Ah, here it is:
[http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...](http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3461&p=2)

Of course, if it ends up being a G45 class chip, it's not going to be much to
write home about (performance wise). Hopefully it ends up being a Larrabee
variant, but that might be hoping for too much.

I'm interested to see what AMD and Intel end up doing with an on core GPU. It
could be really interesting from a GPGPU perspective as you could eliminate
the current need to ship things from main memory to GPU memory.

~~~
wmf
_Of course, if it ends up being a G45 class chip, it's not going to be much to
write home about (performance wise)._

This is the dirty secret of Fusion. Moving a dog-slow GPU from the chipset to
the processor still leaves you with a slow GPU.

 _I'm interested to see what AMD and Intel end up doing with an on core GPU.
It could be really interesting from a GPGPU perspective as you could eliminate
the current need to ship things from main memory to GPU memory._

Unfortunately, a GPU tends to have ~150 GB/s of memory bandwidth while a
processor socket has ~30 GB/s. Is it worth a 5x drop in bandwidth to avoid the
PCI Express bottleneck? Maybe...

~~~
cjenkins
Here's hoping CPU memory bandwidth reaches up towards GPU and GPU doesn't
reach down towards CPU...

