Intel's Larrabee Shaping Up For Next-Gen Xbox, PS4 Consoles ?

13/08/2008
Chris Leyton
Could Intel's GPGPU be appearing in the Xbox 720 or PlayStation 4...

Larrabee, Intel's foray into the world of discrete graphics
processors, could be shaping future next-gen consoles, according to
comments from the chip manufacturer in an interview with Develop.

Offering developers a fully programmable pipeline and based around the
popular x86 instruction set, the Larrabee specifications are
considered to be closer to that of a multi-core CPU than traditional
GPU technology. Such a design allows the technology to fluidly handle
tasks not typically assigned to the GPU, helping out the CPU as and
when needed, and unlocking the true potential of parallel computing
offered by multi-core architecture.

Intel's Aaron Coday revealed, "It's definitely something we would want
to discuss with the console vendors, and hope that the architecture
that we're providing is something that is very compelling for them and
be interesting."

A paper released at SIGGRAPH 2008 indicated that 25 Larrabee cores
running at 1GHz could potentially run Gears of War at 60fps at a
resolution of 1600x1200 - this is believed to be a conservative
estimation as the cores are widely expected to run faster than 1GHz.

http://www.totalvideogames.com/news/...643_6321_0.htm

NV55 wrote:
>
>
> 13/08/2008
> Chris Leyton
> Could Intel's GPGPU be appearing in the Xbox 720 or PlayStation 4...
>
> Larrabee, Intel's foray into the world of discrete graphics
> processors, could be shaping future next-gen consoles, according to
> comments from the chip manufacturer in an interview with Develop.
>
> Offering developers a fully programmable pipeline and based around the
> popular x86 instruction set, the Larrabee specifications are
> considered to be closer to that of a multi-core CPU than traditional
> GPU technology. Such a design allows the technology to fluidly handle
> tasks not typically assigned to the GPU, helping out the CPU as and
> when needed, and unlocking the true potential of parallel computing
> offered by multi-core architecture.


That's only useful in an environment which is already entrenched with an
x86 software background, such as PCs. It's not the case in consoles, and
if anything, the entrenched software background is for IBM's PowerPC
instruction set.

Yousuf Khan

In alt.games.video.xbox Yousuf Khan <bbbl67@yahoo.com> wrote:
> That's only useful in an environment which is already entrenched with an
> x86 software background, such as PCs. It's not the case in consoles, and
> if anything, the entrenched software background is for IBM's PowerPC
> instruction set.

Seeing as how consoles hop from platform to platform each generation, this
isn't really a big deal.

If anything, if Intel can provide really good tools up front, it might end
up having its chips put into the next console.

After all, the biggest complaint we always seem to hear about every
generation is how difficult it is to program for processor XYZ, or that
the default tools for ABC's console aren't very good.

Intel has the advantage here in that many people are already familiar with
their architecture, and they provide very good reference compilers and
support.

--
It's not broken. It's...advanced.