Sandy Bridge is Intel’s new microarchitecture, slated for release in January of 2011. Sandy Bridge processors will effectively phase-out the current lineup of processors, based on the LGA 1366 socket, with processors fitting a brand new socket, LGA 2011.
While I understand the need for technology to move forward, and am an avid user of Intel CPUs myself, I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the reviews, especially on the IGP (integrated graphics processor) front, the part that concerns me greatly.
The tech that Intel chose to use on the die is the HD 3000, and it’s little brother the HD 2000. Let’s hope it’s nothing like the GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) X3000 and family, the scourge of the entire IGP world. Please, Intel, please.
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Intel demoed Larrabee for the first time to the public at the IDF (Intel Developer Forum), according to PC Pro.
The attached screenshot is a bit underwhelming but maybe we’ll see some impressive examples soon. In any case, if the demo is at the IDF now, the public release couldn’t be far off.
Edit (2010):
In case you haven’t heard — it seems like Larrabee was cancelled for good.
Been gone for a couple of days but I’m back with some cool stuff from Intel. Intel has posted a whole bunch of stuff from GDC 2009 on their site, you can check it out right here.
Interestingly, my postscript got answered, Intel has posted (a preview) of Tom Forsyth’s talk on Larrabee’s SIMD extensions, the full version should come online in one month according to the site.
As always with Intel (and many others), you have to read through the marketing crud and filter out the core.
Today Intel released it’s new issue of “Intel Visual Adrenaline” featuring a three page interview with Tom Forsyth about Intel’s upcoming Larrabee GPU, which is x86 based and fully programmable.
Click here to read the PDF, scroll down to page eight (8)
Larrabee will support a rasterization pipeline as well as raytracing but Forsyth mentions raytracing to be more of a technical feature than a mainstream implementation. Regardless of this, for graphics programmers this should be good as there will finally be a piece of hardware that actually supports realtime raytracing.
Direct3D as well as OpenGL will be supported in addition to the much anticipated programmable route, either through C++ or pure assembly, which should open up the card for people interested in parallel computing.
Sadly there’s no definitive answer from Forsyth on how many cores Larrabee will actually contain. I guess we’ll have to wait for that a bit longer.
PS, if anyone is at GDC listening to Abrash and Forsyth tomorrow, let me know what you got from it.
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