Posted on Saturday, May 16 2009 @ 3:01 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The die shots of the Intel Larrabee that were published on
PC Games Hardware earlier this week fueled a lot of speculation about this upcoming graphics chip. You can read an interesting blog post about it
over at The Tech Report.
If you look closely at this high-res version of the die shot, you'll see that the chip is laid out in three rows. The design of the chip looks to be fairly modular, with repeating areas of uniform structures of several types. The most common unit of the chip is most likely the x86-compatible Larrabee shader core, and the dark areas at the ends of its long, rectangular shape are probably cache of some sort, either L1, L2, or both. We know that each core has L1 data and instruction caches, plus 256KB of L2 cache. By my count, there are a total of 32 cores on the chip—10 on the top row, 12 in the middle, and 10 in the bottom row.
