VizWorld.com

Intel has posted an article on using the Cloud to perform ray tracing in games. Normally, I am not a fan of the term Cloud, because of its overuse and hype. However, in this case, I will make an exception because it uses Intel’s Knights Ferry. What is Knight’s Ferry? Remember Larrabee? Larrabee was the codename for a GPGPU chip that Intel was developing, that was canceled. The follow-on project is called Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) project, with the first product being codenamed Knight’s Corner. Knight’s Ferry falls up under the MIC project. The article describes Knight’s Ferry as:

Intel code name Knights Ferry is the first-generation development platform for the Intel MIC Architecture. It includes a PCIe card that has a 32-core chip on it that is clocked at 1.2 GHz. The development platform is programmable with the regular tools and programming languages that developers regularly use. A bit further out there are plans for an Intel MIC Architecture-based product, code named Knights Corner, that will use 22nm manufacturing technology and will therefore be able to even have more than 50 cores on the chip.

The researchers used four server machines, each with a Knights Ferry PCIe card (32 cores, 4 threads per core). Each server also had a i7-980X processor, which has 6 cores running at 3.33 GHz. The thin client was a a small laptop, running on a Core2 Duo processor P9600 and with a 1280×800 screen.

Everything was connected over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN. Now, not everybody has Gigabit Ethernet, but this is a proof of concept, not a finished product. I suspect that Gigabit Ethernet is not necessary anyway. Sure, it gives you a lot of bandwidth, but from my own testing of remote visualization services cloud-based applications, it is the latency that is most important. If you are getting a 100 ms ping, then that means you can only get 10 frames per second, at best. You really need a connection with less than 33 ms ping time to get 30 frames per second, and it would be best if it was even lower.

Now if all of this sounds familiar, it is because we covered it last year in Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced, On a Laptop. At the time, we did not know that they were using Knight’s Ferry. From the conclusion to the article:

Over the last sections it has been shown that ray tracing can offer a variety of new and interesting effects to games. Through this research using a cloud-based gaming setup with machines that utilize the Intel code name Knights Ferry development platform, ray-traced games with a high frame rate can already be achieved today.

Further progress could be made by optimizing the video codec used in order to be able to use it for even smaller devices such as netbooks and tablets. Instead of assuming a Gigabit Ethernet setup, optimizations for wireless networks could be investigated to bring the technology to handheld devices like smartphones. In order to cut down on the number of servers needed, it should be possible to develop support for using multiple Knights Ferry PCIe cards within a single machine. To increase image quality, several well-known post-processing techniques like HDR bloom and depth of field could be added. A smart solution on how to do anti-aliasing for ray tracing with high performance on the Knights Ferry platform could also be investigated.

via : Experimental Cloud-based Ray Tracing Using Intel® MIC Architecture for Highly Parallel Visual Processing

Hardware cloud, intel, knights ferry, larrabee, raytrace, raytracer, raytracing

Back when Intel’s project Larrabee was going to revolutionize the computer graphics space and crush all of their competition with a single blow, Intel made the not-so-surprising move of acquiring a game development company (Offset Software) to create a secret game to demonstrate the hardware.  Called “Project Offset”, a few videos leaked out but nothing more.  With the death of the Larrabee hardware it’s not that surprising, but today Intel has just issued a statement saying that the division has been shut down.

Intel purchased Offset Software to improve our game development knowledge-base and to further Intel’s visual computing technology development expertise, helping the company offer robust products, support, and tools to customers. With the recent changes in our product roadmap, some of the resources and technologies from the acquisition are being re-applied to help support new graphics related projects. Additionally, other Offset Software team members have moved onto other external projects outside the company.

The founders have moved on and created ‘Fractiv’, and presumably will finish the project there.

via Intel’s ‘Project Offset’ First Person Shooter Canned.

Hardware intel, larrabee, video game

Back on December 7th, we reported that Intel’s GPU chipset codenamed “Larrabee” was shut down. While later rumors claimed that Larrabee would rise from the dead like Lazarus, it appears that today the final nail has been pounded into the coffin. In a blog post, Bill Kircos, Intel’s Director of Product & Technology PR, has said that in the short term future, “Intel will not bring a discrete graphics product to market”. You can read the relevant portion of his blog post below.

In a nutshell, Intel has three visual computing efforts. The first is the aforementioned processor graphics. Since we began integrating graphics inside our chipsets back in 1999 (and now integrate graphics inside our processor products), the majority of PC users are now using integrated solutions. Second, for our smaller Intel® Atom™ processor and System on Chip efforts, and third, a many-core, programmable Intel architecture and first product both of which we referred to as Larrabee for graphics and other workloads. Here’s the latest:

1. Our top priority continues to be around delivering an outstanding processor that addresses every day, general purpose computer needs and provides leadership visual computing experiences via processor graphics. We are further boosting funding and employee expertise here, and continue to champion the rapid shift to mobile wireless computing and HD video – we are laser-focused on these areas.

2. We are also executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips. This server product line expansion is optimized for a broader range of highly parallel workloads in segments such as high performance computing. Intel VP Kirk Skaugen will provide an update on this next week at ISC 2010 in Germany.

3. We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market, at least in the short-term. As we said in December, we missed some key product milestones. Upon further assessment, and as mentioned above, we are focused on processor graphics, and we believe media/HD video and mobile computing are the most important areas to focus on moving forward.

4. We will also continue with ongoing Intel architecture-based graphics and HPC-related R&D and proof of concepts.

via Technology@Intel · An Update On Our Graphics-related Programs.

Hardware intel, larrabee

TechEYE.net has an article up claiming to have an inside source on the Intel Larrabee engineering team that claims news of Larrabee’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

“We were literally hundreds of people, Intel picked some really big hitters and a lot of those people are still hovering around waiting for Larrabee to come online again,” he said.

And when it does resurface, don’t expect it to be poorly bunged together, either. According to our source, some disgruntled ex-Larrabee project employees had been actively spreading fud and lies, leaking bad information to press about Larrabee’s technical capabilities.

Frankly, the article doesn’t say anything we don’t already know.  I don’t think anyone in their right minds believes it is truly dead, and even Intel claimed that it was first going to transition it to a parallelism SDK before returning to the original hardware strategy.  The fact that ‘hundreds of people’ were involved doesn’t mean much, and that they’re ‘hovering around waiting for Larrabee to come online again’ means (to me) that it has been shelved temporarily and hasn’t changed since the SC09 demo.

The real question is will Larrabee come ‘out of the gate’ ready to stomp AMD & NVidia, or will it be playing a distant second (or third) fiddle to existing GPGPU technology?

via Intel’s Larrabee to do a Lazarus | Chips news | TechEye – All the technology news unfit for print.

Hardware intel, larrabee

InsideHPC noticed that yesterday’s stock prices show some pretty significant shift in the industry as the death of Larrabee signaled a big win for AMD and NVidia.

So what’s next for the Intel Larrabee division? Intel spokespeople indicated that a future Larrabee product would be used for a software development platform for graphics and high performance computing. What that really means, no one outside Intel really knows. Either way, NVIDIA’s shares closed up narly 13% on Monday evening at $16.09 and AMD closed up 8.4% at $8.52.

Reuters via NVIDIA, AMD Stocks Rally as Intel Larrabee Retreats | insideHPC.com.

Hardware amd, intel, larrabee, nvidia, stockmarket

For anyone looking for more news on the delay of Intel’s Larrabee Chipset, There’s plenty of it.  I’ve scoured the net and gathered up some of the better articles on its demise.

• InsideHPC
• Anandtech
• ExPreview
• Tom’s Hardware
• Reuters
• Bright Side of News
• TechTree India
• TGDaily, from Jon Peddie
• Tim Sweeny,

Alas poor Larrabee, we hardly knew ye.

Hardware intel, larrabee

In a surprising bit of news from Intel, their GPU chipset codenamed “Larrabee” has been pretty much shut down.  The part will come to market eventually, another delay pushes it somewhere into 2010, but won’t be a GPU but rather a multicore computing chipset.

Specifically, Larrabee v1 is so delayed that, at the time it eventually launches, it just won’;t be competitive as a discrete graphics part, so Intel plans to wring some value out of it by putting it out as a test-bed for doing multicore graphics and supercomputing development. Intel will eventually put out a GPU, but may not be the one we've been calling “Larrabee” for the past few years.

This falls in line with what I noticed of Rattner’s Supercomputing2009 keynote where he continued to refer to it as a computational accelerator, rather than a GPU.

via Intel’s Larrabee GPU put on ice, more news to come in 2010.

Hardware intel, larrabee

At the recent Supercomputing2009 Conference in Portland, OR, Intel’s Justin Rattner talked about the Rise of the 3D Internet as a tool for collaboration and presentation of HPC resources in a friendly way to users.  Disguised in the middle of his talk was a few slides about the upcoming Larrabee chipset with a live on-stage demo. He showed the chipset and ran a few demo’s with some help from Pradeep Dubey, and from my notes:

• SGEMM – Using only half the cores of larrabee, 380GFlops.  With all cores enabled:700Gflops
• SPMVM Sparse Matrices – QCD – FEM_CANT – About 8GFlops

In addition, he discusses the “MYO” (Mine-Yours-Ours) memory architecture where there is not the usual separation between CPU Memory & GPU Memory.  Another interesting tidbit was that not once during the entire hour-plus presentation did he refer to Larrabee as a Graphics Chip or GPU, but rather as a Compute Accelerator.  An interesting change in terminology for a company that previously wanted to wipe out NVidia in the graphics space.

The entire talk is now available on Youtube, and I’ve embedded it after the break.

Read more…

Hardware intel, larrabee, sc09

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.

Hardware, Science gpgpu, intel, larrabee

Pat Gelsinger holding Larrabee Silicon

John West of InsideHPC has a great interview with Justin Rattner of Intel about his background in HPC computing and Intel’s contribution to supercomputing over the years.  Towards the end they begin talking about the recent popularity of GPU computing and he lets slip a few tidbits of Larrabee.

“The goal of our next generation Larrabee is to take a MIMD approach to visual computing,” he says. Part of Intel’s motivation for this decision is that the platform scales from mobile devices all the way up to supercomputers. And they have early performance results that will be presented at an IEEE conference later this year that show that the Larrabee outperforms both the Nehalem and NVIDIA’s GT280 on volumetric rendering problems.

via Interview With An HPC Pioneer | insideHPC.com.

Hardware intel, interview, larrabee