Bennett Ring05 August 2008, 6:49 PM
Intel is taking the multi-core approach with its work in the graphics field. Unlike SLI, it just might work.
Ahead of the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2008 expo, taking place on August 12 in LA, Intel has released the first solid details of its Larrabee graphics architecture. While products utilising the Larrabee design won’t be forthcoming until late 2009 or early 2010, today saw the first tentative benchmark figures released. Buried within the enticingly titled “Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing” whitepaper were extremely vague benchmark results for Larrabee performance within Half Life 2: Ep 1, F.E.A.R. and Gears of War.
Unfortunately the benchmarks don’t detail what resolution the games were run in, what detail settings were used, nor which scene was rendered. They were also run on simulated hardware, although the processing costs used in the simulation were deliberately “aggressively pessimistic”. The theoretical Larrabee processors used in the test were based on “Larrabee units”, where each unit is a 1GHz Larrabee core – but this is not the final frequency that each Larrabee core will run at. All sounds rather nebulous, doesn’t it?
However, what these benchmarks do suggest is that Larrabee’s multicore design scales extremely well when additional cores are thrown into the mix. Doubling the number of cores equates to an almost one for one performance increase, making the wastage of SLI and Crossfire look positively primitive. In fact, even a six-fold increase from the smallest Larrabee processor (which will utilise eight cores) up to a 48-core monster saw a mere seven to ten percent loss of expected performance. Goodbye Tri-SLI. The report also determined that a minimum of ten Larrabee units would be necessary to run each of the benchmarks at a sixty frames per second – considering the smallest Larrabee product will ship with eight cores, it suggests that today’s games shouldn’t be a struggle for Larrabee.
While much is still unknown about Larrabee, today’s information finally provided some detail on how the architecture will work, and emphasised how multi-cores are at the heart of its design. We’ll have more info over the coming days, as Intel presents more info to the world’s graphics elite.