mount_larrabee Dr. Dobb’s Journal asks the question: Is Larrabee For the Rest of Us? Larrabee is the code name for a new microprocessor developed by Intel for GPGPU programming. Larrabee is meant to compete against the threat posed by AMD with its Radeon series of graphics chips, and NVIDIA with its line of GeForce graphics chips. Intel’s chip is also of particular interest to the High Performance Computing world. However, both the GPGPU world, and the HPC world are very small at the moment. Thus the question is asked, “Is Larrabee of any benefit to the rest of the programming community?”

The author of the article is Daniele Paolo Scarpazza. He works at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Mr. Scarpazza takes a look at Larrabee’s instruction set (LRBni) and shows how to map code onto this design. In particular, he shows that data-parallel techniques from SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) architectures are effective on Larrabee. He also warns that if you do not use such techniques, then you will probably only utilize 7% of the computational power of Larrabee.