Intel: Initial Larrabee graphics chip canceled

[7oby]

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=659
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10409715-64.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

intel won't sell Larrabee on the retail market in the near future. There're still options, but for those who've been holping Larrabee would give the flexibility of x264 at the power of current GPU implementations, will be disappointed.

In the past this forum had numerous discussions pro/contra CUDA, OpenCL, ... And some were hoping for Larrabee soon and argued it wouldn't be worth the effort to optimize software for GPUs, that will be superseeded by Larrabee anyway.

[cogman]

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=659
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10409715-64.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

intel won't sell Larrabee on the retail market in the near future. There're still options, but for those who've been holping Larrabee would give the flexibility of x264 at the power of current GPU implementations, will be disappointed.

In the past this forum had numerous discussions pro/contra CUDA, OpenCL, ... And some were hoping for Larrabee soon and argued it wouldn't be worth the effort to optimize software for GPUs, that will be superseeded by Larrabee anyway.

I was disappointed at this announcement as well. I read somewhere that they were going to allow small groups of developers and such use the current version of the chip, but that it won't be released to the general consumers.

Apparently, speeds were garbage. Even with that, I bet they would have gotten pretty good x264 encoding speeds.

(I'm usually not a grammar nazi, but, there're? :) You meant they're. Your other two options are there and their...)

[7oby]

There is another intel CPU - which is very similar to the Larrabee design in my option: Single-chip Cloud Computer
http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm

Consisting of 48 cores and also derived from the P55C design. But also only an experimental plattform. Acutally I'm curious about the differences to the Larrabee design?!?

EDIT: Anand gives the answer. Single-Chip Cloud Computer has 48 cores, Larrabee has 32:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3686

[slavickas]

err and what it have to do with H.264?...

[Caroliano]

More information on the Single-chip Cloud Computer. It seems only an experimental chip, to aid in future developments.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/12/3/intel-shows-48-core-cloud-cpu.aspx

The reason why he posted here is explained in the first post, but I agree that this is not the most adequaded place in this forum for hardware discussion... there is an hardware forum here.

[benwaggoner]

err and what it have to do with H.264?...
It would bring GPU level parallelization with x86 compatibility. Could be a great platform for H.264 encoding, particularly as existing GPU platforms are not well suited for stuff like CABAC.

[slavickas]

yes, but we dont know how fast it actually could be too many too weak cores may not be suitable for encoding

[nm]

yes, but we dont know how fast it actually could be too many too weak cores may not be suitable for encoding

Looking at the SIGGRAPH 2008 paper (http://software.intel.com/file/2824/), the chip design certainly seems quite promising. Of course, the actual performance may be worse than what can be estimated, but I still think it would compare favorably to current CPU architectures in video encoding tasks.