Intel’s future graphics chip adding a new vector
Intel released a few incremental details about its future graphics chip on Monday, but left a lot of unanswered questions about the company’s push into uncharted waters.
Larrabee, a “many-core” graphics processor scheduled for 2009 or 2010, will come with a brand-new set of vector-processing instructions as part of its design, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group. Vector-processing instructions are used to improve the performance of graphics and video applications; you may have heard of previous vector-processing implementations such as SSE4.
These new instructions, combined with Larrabee’s compatibility with the x86 instruction set, will make life easier for software developers, according to Gelsinger. In addition to regular graphics tasks currently dominated by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, Intel wants Larrabee to be able to take on a wider variety of tasks
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