Larrabee that could be a dream console processor

Intel is continues with its PR “heartbeat”, revealing a few more details about its upcoming graphics processor codenamed Larrabee. First of all, we now know that Larrabee uses X86 cores based on the original Pentium design (because it was before Intel added MMX?). However, the design has important modifications to make it suitable for graphics (and high-performance computing): it has a 16-wide vector processor and it has been designed to better hide memory latency, as typically seen in graphics applications. Note that the vector processor is the foundation to the parallel-computing capability here. Intel adamantly says that Larrabee is not a GPU, but can act as one. This is somewhat true, although in practice, I suspect that it will only be a GPU when it debuts.

We now know that Larrabee will be DirectX and OpenGL compliant through a 100% software renderer. Current GPU have certain parts like polygon setup and blending that are “fixed” or “hardwired” (which means that they are not programmable). However, Larrabee will use a fixed-function texture filtering mechanism. This part of the workload is just too expensive to do (for now) in a more flexible way and is better off using a fixed solution.

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