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Rumour control: Why Larrabee will be based on P54C
After giving P54C to the American military, Intel apparently now has the core back, and it’s been thoroughly debugged with a much smaller footprint
As you may have noticed, we recently updated a Rumour Control story about Larrabee being based on several P54C (original Pentium) cores after a response from Intel. Interestingly, however, Intel didn’t deny the rumour, but simply pointed out that it was German tech site Heise who suggested that Larrabee would be based on P54C, rather than Pat Gelsinger. Interestingly, though, another tech site, Ars Technica, claims to know that Larrabee will indeed be based on P54C.
The site claims that it’s been ‘sitting on’ the same information since last year, and reiterates that ‘Larrabee is, in essence, a bunch of P54C (i.e. pre-MMX) Pentium cores that have been enhanced with very wide vector floating-point resources.’ What’s more interesting, though, is the reason why.
According to Ars Technica, when the old P54C core was past its prime, Intel gave the core’s RTL code to the Pentagon so that the American military could develop a ‘radiation hardened’ version for military applications. Apparently, the Pentagon, which has its own facilities for chip fabrication, then worked on cleaning up the core’s RTL code, before offering it back to Intel when it was no longer useful. After the work from the Pentagon, Ars Technica claims that the P54C now ‘has a very small footprint, and has also been ‘pretty thoroughly debugged.’
Intel has now ‘modified it for use in the many-core chip that later became Larrabee,’ says the site. Of course, this is all still very much a rumour, but Heise’s speculation could well be on the ball. Larrabee is due to be shown at Siggraph later this year, and Intel has already revealed a few details here. According to the Siggraph write-up, ‘Larrabee uses multiple in-order x86 CPU cores that are augmented by a wide vector processor unit,’ which could well mean multiple P54C (also an in-order x86 architecture) cores with a 512-bit wide SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) vector processing unit, as suggested in our original story.
The Siggraph write-up continues, saying that Larrabee ‘provides dramatically higher performance per watt and per unit of area than out-of-order CPUs on highly parallel workloads and greatly increases the flexibility and programmability of the architecture as compared to standard GPUs.’
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Thats what lashing boats together denotes. Towing each other would be used if I were alluding to a Linear arrangement. And my comment was aimed at the article, not at any person in particular. I agree with what you suggest could be what Intel are doing and why they are doing it with what appears, at first sight, to be a strange choice of processor. The question remains why if it is such a good way of going about it why noone else has thought of it [using a cheap old chip] before. Thats all. It is just a rumour so far and no big deal, I hope.
Comment by saythatagain at 1:45pm 14th July 2008
Yeah, becase we are all using 16 layer blueray in every optical device in the house. We all got 150+mb net connections. We all using 1.5TB HDDs. Hell, the technology is there so we must all be using it alreayd right. New technology is expensive. I think this whole description of the cores being P1 based is being taken too literally. Hell the core architecture is just a P3. TBH saying these thigns are running P1s is just saying they are running 32 x86 class processors, without the extra instruction sets intel placed on newer processors. Its really not that hard to believe. And if it is then read up on wtf a processor actually is. And to saythatagain. This isnt like lashing 32 boats together. This is more like saying a shipping company has some 400 meter boats to carry goods. But they are looking at using multiple 100 meter boats in parallel to carry goods in the future. PARALLEL.
Comment by reashlin at 12:52pm 11th July 2008
Look for Intel to succeed with a radically different gfx tech they will need support from the games companies. Games companies that are busy making bucket loads designing games for consoles which are still using the traditional tech. Will they likely develop games just to take advantage of Intel's? Until there is the support from the games companies it will be dead in the water. Sorry I just dont see it succeeding - which will be a good thing (anyone remember what Intel was like before it had competition?). PS if it that bloody good now that the Military have had their hands on it why haven't they used it in current cpu's?
Comment by pvtbanner at 9:37am 11th July 2008
hmmm, i did not realize that our military (yes, i'm american) had chip fabs. that helps explain the amount of money our military uses, theres a reason intel is a multi billion dollar corporation, they need to be. those fab's are not cheap. and btw; the reason intel uses older tech as the basis for it's new tech is that when they moved to netburst they no longer had a good design to build on. they needed to re-design, but doing it all from scratch would be rather daunting in my mind.
Comment by yougotkicked at 7:50pm 10th July 2008
The Royal Navy tried using a 32 rowing boats lashed together to improve on their latest aircraft carrier. Obviously Intel thought that a good idea. Mind you I think its not that far in the future that pigs really will be able to fly so I will not deny that this rumour is untrue or very distorted. However it doesn't seem to hold water under close analysis but I am often proved wrong.
Comment by saythatagain at 3:01pm 10th July 2008
Isn't the Core 2 architecture we now have just modified Pentium III cores? All this "why are they doing that" isn't getting to the point. The point is that Intel will have 32 simplified and streamlined x86 cores, at least 10x smaller than they used to be making them faster and more efficient by the bucketload....and it may well do the job just nicely... ...and this is coming from someone that doesn't like Intel much...
Comment by smartwasp at 3:03pm 10th July 2008
This isnt a case of intel just runnin several old CPUs as a modern GPU. This is using technology which isnt much different to modern CPUs but has been thouroghly compressed. If we are talking about 32 cores then this must be a sod-load smaller than 1cm square. This has to be les than 1/32 inch square. Also an old CPU architecture is not that radically different to a new one. The instructions it supports might be old but the architecture itself isnt. Its like questioning why intel dropped back to the P2s when it came out with the Pentium Ms and Core architecture. Also I'll still guess that intel isnt looking solely at the GFX market here. They are looking first and foremost as GPGPU work. Highly parrallel x86 cores at 0.5-1GHZ each. thats still the equivalent of a quad core at 4GHZ conservative estimate. Moving into the future the standard GPUs are just too specialised. Sure they have extreme performance but that is because they are developed solely for rasterisation. Given new technologies, GPGPU and ray-tracing are beginning to emerge we all need a new GPU architecture out there.
Comment by reashlin at 1:01pm 10th July 2008
Intel overproduced those cheap things, I guess... Now, they r finding a way to get 'em out! Hmm...... jus joking... It makes sense to use light weight reasonably fast many cores -- which sure will beat a high-speed CPU by an order of magnitude!
Comment by Sarnath at 1:01pm 10th July 2008
What I can't get round my head is the fact they are using really old technology. Since I was around using this exact processor in 95/96. I'm sure the Military have squeezed a hell of alot more out of it while they've been searching for aliens. Or maybe they've used freaky deaky alien technology to clean the chips up and handed them back to Intel. Now Intel will mass produce the chips on the Larrabee cards but now with hidden extra terrestrial coding that will brain wash us all!!!!!! Or am I just paranoid?
Comment by crazyceo at 10:36am 10th July 2008
I think that what the pentagon have done is a radical redesign of the chip, it metioned the pentagon having their own fabs. The chances are with new production methods these old pentiums take up about 1cm square. And not to mention new instruction set and SIMD. It's baically been totally redesigned by the military, so the clocks could be higher than the pentiums, then multiply all that goodness by 32 and you have some real power.
Comment by joeamnesiac at 9:33pm 9th July 2008
Old pentium chips? why? The red and green teams must be quaking in their boots - not. Believe it when i see it.
Comment by pvtbanner at 8:51pm 9th July 2008
Yes a modern CPU would definitely blast those old chips away. How many of them could you fit onto a single board though before needing a nuclear reactor to power your PC though? The enhancements to the design make the old P54C chips sound ideal for massive parallelism.
Comment by OB_Writer at 5:04pm 9th July 2008
that in the future, if this takes off, that we will have a secondary CPU style socket which you'll plug your GPU core into and a set of GDDR ram ports on the mobo to allow you to easilly upgrade your GPU without the huge cost everytime you upgrade and you will have a much bigger choice of what components you want, whether you want GDDR5/6 with 2Gb of it, or 1Gb or whether you want to upgrade your GPU core speed to 1000Mhz/1Ghz, although that sort of tech may take a while to develop, it would be very interesting to see.
Comment by NikoBellic at 5:27pm 9th July 2008
I think it's likely larabee will be for more than just graphics, otherwise whats the benefit of the improved programmability of using x86. Graphics dont require better programmability as they go thorugh the directx or opengl interface (hence it doesn't matter whether you have an ATI or Nvidia card).
Comment by NewParadigm at 5:07pm 9th July 2008
Yes a modern CPU would definitely blast those old chips away. How many of them could you fit onto a single board though before needing a nuclear reactor to power your PC though? The enhancements to the design make the old P54C chips sound ideal for massive parallelism.
Comment by OB_Writer at 5:04pm 9th July 2008
a CPUs performance in different tasks depends on lots of different things like its pipeline length. Larrabee will be used for processing graphics, a task which modern CPUs are not optimised for. Its much cheaper for intel to alter an old architecture which is similar to what they need, rather than design a completely new architecture.
Comment by Cogwulf at 4:55pm 9th July 2008
Why wouldn't they just use modern CPU's instead of these old ones? I'm sure a Core Duo or Core Quad would blast everything else away and perform alot better than the old Pentiums.
Comment by crazyceo at 4:42pm 9th July 2008
Sorry, Custom PC comments are now closed.
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