Comparison With Competing Products
Larrabee can be considered a hybrid between a multi-core CPU and a GPU, and has similarities to both. Its coherent cache hierarchy and x86 architecture compatibility are CPU-like, while its wide SIMD vector units and texture sampling hardware are GPU-like.
As a GPU, Larrabee would have supported traditional rasterized 3D graphics (Direct3D & OpenGL) for games. However, Larrabee's hybrid of CPU and GPU features should also have been suitable for general purpose GPU (GPGPU) or stream processing tasks. For example, Larrabee might have performed ray tracing or physics processing, in real time for games or offline for scientific research as a component of a supercomputer.
Larrabee's early presentation drew some criticism from GPU competitors. At NVISION 08, an Nvidia employee called Intel's SIGGRAPH paper about Larrabee "marketing puff" and quoted an industry analyst (Peter Glaskowsky) who speculated that the Larrabee architecture was "like a GPU from 2006". As of June 2009, prototypes of Larrabee have been claimed to be on par with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285. Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, delivered a keynote at the Supercomputing 2009 conference on November 17, 2009. During his talk he demonstrated an overclocked Larrabee processor topping one teraFLOPS in performance. He claimed this was the first public demonstration of a single chip solution exceeding one teraFLOPS. He pointed out this was early silicon thereby leaving open the question on eventual performance for Larrabee. Because this was only one fifth that of available competing graphics boards, Larrabee was cancelled "as a standalone discrete graphics product" on December 4, 2009.
Read more about this topic: Larrabee (microarchitecture)
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