Larrabee: A fiasco, or the future?

[AffenJack]

oh please... how does that change anything? if resource usage would vary so much, and at one time a part of the gpu is barely used while another is used heavily, then dont you think ati and nvidia would have come up with some way of improving this? ever heard of pixel and vertex shaders getting merged to use the gpus resources more efficiently and assign resources dynamically to whatever needs to be done?

Ressource usage can change very extremely from game to game, look at af in hawx. Ati looses a lot with af because the tmus are limiting. But the problem is it isn't easy to improve this thing. But there are people sayin, we'll see improvements in the not so far away future

[Unoid]

saaya, maybe the difference will be made up by better IPC and something about LRB being 2ghz? instead of 850mhz like todays gpus

[saaya]

unoid, clockspeed and ipc are just other words for transistor performance...
i believe intel can get better perf per transistor than tsmc, probably, but not that much more...

i just read some 5870/5850 reviews...
they doubled the resources of their previous chip and only got a 20-40% performance boost on average... ouch... what happened?

sounds like they are hitting a perf wall somehow?
if you can get 75% the perf with half the transistors of todays highend cards... then lrb really shouldnt have a problem performing well in rasterization...

is this some sort of rasterization limitation? whats holding the perf back?
i thought graphics was THE example of multithreaded performance scaling where doubling the resources always gets you close to double the performance?

[Dante80]

i just read some 5870/5850 reviews...
they doubled the resources of their previous chip and only got a 20-40% performance boost on average... ouch... what happened?

you didn't actually read the reviews, thats what happened...

[saaya]

you didn't actually read the reviews, thats what happened...

yeah i read several now and got a better idea of perf... slightly slower than 4870x2 for a slightly higher price... makes sense for people who have 30" displays...

5850 is great for people who dont have a 4890 or gtx285 now... i think its a good upgrade from a 4850 and gts250 and below...

Larrabee die:

j/k about the die

hahahah good one!

Was Gulftown doing all the heavy lifting here?

yes thats what i wondered as well... why did they stick lrb in a box with a 6core 12 thread cpu? could be that it was partially done by the cpu actually...

and seriously, even if its done on lrb only... this is raytracing, lrbs home territory... and it can only pull around 10fps? and rasterization perf is supposed to be on par with gtx285 and more?