Event Coverage

IDF Fall 2007 Update (Part 1)

By Dr. Jimmy Tang - 19 Sep 2007

Larrabee, USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps

Larrabee

Intel CEO Paul Otellini today also talked about the Larrabee project, which is essentially a new multi-core product which comprises of many IA-based cores. According to Otellini, Intel is currently developing this product and will be ready to demonstrate its capabilities in 2008. Larrabee is expected to deliver teraflops of performance from a single multi-core chip.

What is particularly interesting with Larrabee is that it is not only going to be superb for supercomputing, financial services, physics and health applications, but Intel intends to use it for graphics as well. If you think about it, if a chip with teraflops capability was tailored for physics or supercomputing purposes, it should have excellent floating point performance. So if Intel wants to use it for graphics, it is quite likely that Larrabee might be Intel's ticket into the discrete graphics space since Larrabee is no ordinary graphics processor. The advantage with Larrabee is that it is IA based, so the same existing programming models used today for Intel processors can be applied to the Larrabee. We suspect Intel may be pushing ray-tracing 3D graphics to be implemented with Larrabee instead of traditional rasterization techniques. Although 3D games today are created using rasterization techniques, game developers prefer ray-tracing as it creates very accurate 3D renders. However, ray-tracing is very compute intensive, but with proper optimizations, will scale well under highly parallel environments. Therefore, a multi-core multi-threaded floating point intensive chip like Larrabee should fit the requirements of ray-tracing extremely well. And we believe that Larrabee will help Intel change how the discrete graphics game is played in the future.
 

USB 3.0

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Enterprise Group, also announced the formation of the USB 3.0 Promoter Group. The group which comprises of other companies including HP, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated, will work on a new USB interface technology that promises to deliver over 10 times the performance of current USB 2.0. The new specification will be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency, as well as backward compatible with current USB 2.0 ports and cabling. It will also be the first I/O interface that will be designed to support both optical and copper interconnects.

 The proposed USB 3.0 connector with both copper and optical interconnects.

SATA - Moving On To 6Gb/s

Not only is USB 3.0 getting a speed bump, SATA will also be bumped up to 6Gbps by the end of 2008. The specifications are still not finalized but the announcements were made during the morning keynotes. What we do know is that it will consume less power. Besides that, the SATA working group also announced new SATA Revision 2.6 specifications that define new cables and connectors as well as new NCQ (Native Command Queuing) priority and unload enhancements. NCQ Priority enhancement adds priority to data in complex workload environments while NCQ Unload enhancement permits robust use in laptop environments where the drive may be dropped.

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