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0 pointsimmibis1y ago0 comments

Wasn't Intel Larrabee something like that? Get a bunch of dumb x86 cores together and tell them to do graphics?

0 comments

I'm so sad Larrabee or similar things never took off. No, it might not have benchmarked well against contemporary graphics cards, but I think these matrixes of x86 cores could have come to great use for cool things not necessarily related to graphics.

fancyfredbot1y ago

Intel launched Larabee as Xeon Phi for non-graphics purposes. Turns out it wasn't especially good at those either. You can still pick one up on eBay today for not very much.

Y_Y1y ago

The novelty of sshing into a PCI card is nice though. I remember trying to use them at a hpc cluster, all the convenience of wrangling GPUs but at a fraction of the performance

bee_rider1y ago

Probably not aided by the fact that conventional Xeon core counts were sneaking up on them—not quite caught up, but anybody could see the trajectory—and offered a much more familiar environment.

1 more reply

actionfromafar1y ago

That's where we have to agree to (potentially) disagree. I lament that these or similar designs didn't last longer in the market, so people could learn how to harness them.

Imagine for instance hard real time tasks, each one task running on its own separate core.

2 more replies

erik1y ago

Larrabee was mostly x86 cores, but it did have sampling/texturing hardware because it's way more efficient to do those particular things in the 3d pipeline with dedicated hardware.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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actionfromafar1y ago

fancyfredbot1y ago

Intel launched Larabee as Xeon Phi for non-graphics purposes. Turns out it wasn't especially good at those either. You can still pick one up on eBay today for not very much.

Y_Y1y ago

The novelty of sshing into a PCI card is nice though. I remember trying to use them at a hpc cluster, all the convenience of wrangling GPUs but at a fraction of the performance

bee_rider1y ago

Probably not aided by the fact that conventional Xeon core counts were sneaking up on them—not quite caught up, but anybody could see the trajectory—and offered a much more familiar environment.

1 more reply

actionfromafar1y ago

That's where we have to agree to (potentially) disagree. I lament that these or similar designs didn't last longer in the market, so people could learn how to harness them.

Imagine for instance hard real time tasks, each one task running on its own separate core.

2 more replies

erik1y ago

Larrabee was mostly x86 cores, but it did have sampling/texturing hardware because it's way more efficient to do those particular things in the 3d pipeline with dedicated hardware.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse