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Written by Daniel
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Friday, 29 June 2007 17:18 |
Intel's next GPU to be Pentium MMX-based?
By Jon Stokes | Published: June 29, 2007 - 03:01PM CT
ARS Technica
Last night, I was sitting around thinking about Intel's forthcoming discrete GPU, codenamed "Larrabee." Specifically, I was thinking about how Larrabee will have lots of simple, in-order cores with a short pipeline, and it occurred to me that they might look something like Pentium cores. And lo and behold, I awakened this morning to a rumor that Intel is reviving the Pentium MMX microarchitecture for Larrabee.
The story told by Tech.co.uk is that, "the late 90s processor core will be resurrected in a highly modified form... Precisely how closely related Larrabee's execution cores will be to the original Pentium MMX isn't known."
Well, let's see. If you take the Pentium MMX microarchitecture, which fits the bill of short, simple, and in order, you enlarge the front end to support four-way SMT, you massively expand the floating-point/vector datapaths from 80 bits to 512 bits, and you put Vec16 hardware in the back end, then you have... something bears about as much resemblance to the Pentium MMX as Core 2 Duo does to the Pentium Pro.... More Discussion in the Forums |
