Intel working on Larrabee 2.

[nAo]

Nothing particularly groundbreaking here, as expected Intel is already at work on the second iteration of Larrabee. In fact they are actively hiring staff to work on it (quoted from their website):

Pre-Si Emulation Engineer – 560430

Description

In this position, you will be part of an exciting team developing and deploying state-of-art Emulation technologies for validation of Intel Larrabee (LRB) Graphics processors. You'll be focusing on some of the responsibilities that include but are not be limited to:
- Responsible for the Emulation Model Builds including RTL coding, linting, synthesis and others
- Developing and executing validation plans for Emulation including test-bench/ tests development, debug and others
- Working with Pre/Post Si Validation teams, SW OS and/or driver and/or Application teams to develop and execute emulation solutions for LRB2
- Working with design teams, and tool vendors to execute LRB2 Emulation plans, develop tool methodologies and flows and others
- Working on full-chip, system-level, sub-FC validation for emulation

LRB Front-End Logic Design Eng – 558503

Description

In this position, you will be playing a key technical role in front end development of the LRB2 design. Your responsibilities will include but not be limited to:
- Micro-architecture development and RTL design of one or more complex functional units
- Working with architecture teams to scope out implementation costs, power-performance tradeoffs and propose alternative solutions
- Working with validation teams to drive appropriate validation strategies and actively contributing to a high quality design
- Working with backend teams to enable convergence to meet aggressive design targets
- Contributing to advancing design processes/design methodologies

Perhaps you might want to help them manufacturing Larrabee based cards:

Graphics Card Manufacturing En – 558670

Description

In this position, you will be part of the manufacturing operations team in the Visual Computing Group, part of DEG. You will have broad-based responsibility for enabling ODM and/or CM manufacturing capability and readiness to produce Larrabee based board products. These will be dual-sided, +wave, PCI form factor cards with soldered down, high performance memory and a very large FCBGA processor. The card will also have a large thermal solution assembly.

 

[INKster]

That last point is an interesting one, actually (leaving behind the fact that this particular position seems to be aimed at prototyping and not any actual commercial products).
We know they'll produce the chip at their own fabs, but will Intel manufacture the PCB and/or complete card reference design by itself, or will they follow AMD/ATI and Nvidia, leaving that task to Taiwanese and Chinese OEM's to offset costs ?
Furthermore, will they sell a Larrabee add-on card under the Intel brand like their current motherboards ?

 

[scificube]

GPU...thy days are numbers, though they hast great love heaped upon you for so long...nay...none of it shall sustain you.

AMD may be able to contend with Intel for the future but Nvidia had better think of something fast and have it ready within 3 to 5 years. There is no room to mistake Intels intentions here. Adapt or perish.

 

[silent_guy]

...but will Intel manufacture the PCB and/or complete card reference design by itself, ...

The margins of a company like Flextronics is on the order of 1 to 2% of the BOM. They can't afford to waste time or money on design NRE, so Intel is fully responsible for the design the PCB and the reference card, which requires almost exactly the same skills as mass producing them.

I think there's no way Intel will produce anything else than the die (and, maybe, just maybe, the substrate.)

 

[kyetech]

Will Intel use their usual tick toc strategy with LRB? & would that cycle be limiting for them considering AMD, NV would usually aim to co-incide launches with things like new revisions of DX, or just for the need of staying competitive?

I wonder if Intel would bother with half nodes now, especially if beyond 22nm a cycle may extend to three years instead of two?. Which their has been some talk of.

I wonder when this second architecture release is planned for?

 

[scificube]

Will Intel use their usual tick toc strategy with LRB? & would that cycle be limiting for them considering AMD, NV would usually aim to co-incide launches with things like new revisions of DX, or just for the need of staying competitive?

I wonder if Intel would bother with half nodes now, especially if beyond 22nm a cycle may extend to three years instead of two?. Which their has been some talk of.

I wonder when this second architecture release is planned for?

I believe it the release date is just a bit longer than it would take to develop a top notch game title that takes full advantage of LRB.

LRB 1 will be out so a studio can prototype their code to large degree while they wait for LRB 2 to come to market.

Since LRB 1 is coming next year last I heard and it takes about 2 years to make a decent title on average I would say 2.5 to 3 years from now isn't a horrible guess...even if its just a guess.

 

[liolio]

The really question, Nao do you plan to apply to one of this job?

 

[nAo]

The really question, Nao do you plan to apply to one of this job?

 

[Scali]

The margins of a company like Flextronics is on the order of 1 to 2% of the BOM. They can't afford to waste time or money on design NRE, so Intel is fully responsible for the design the PCB and the reference card, which requires almost exactly the same skills as mass producing them.

I think there's no way Intel will produce anything else than the die (and, maybe, just maybe, the substrate.)

Does Intel actually make its own motherboards though?
I know they sell motherboards under their own brand, but they could just be a rebadged OEM job.
I think there is a real possibility that Intel will sell Intel-branded cards though, even if they don't actually produce the whole product themselves.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel would initially be the only IHV for Larrabee, and save third-party deals for when the product is successful and sold in larger volumes.

 

[liolio]

Sorry the first one looks more like software oriented (I might missunderstand the points... ).
And the question was not that serious but as you seem wiling to put you hand on the thing... I asked not like a complete joke thus but anyway.



-------------------------------------->[]
I'm already far...

 

[entity279]

Does Intel actually make its own motherboards though?
I know they sell motherboards under their own brand, but they could just be a rebadged OEM job.

The mother-company of Foxconn usually build thouse MBs...

 

[silent_guy]

Does Intel actually make its own motherboards though?I know they sell motherboards under their own brand, but they could just be a rebadged OEM job.

Those are more or less orthogonal concepts. If Intel designs the motherboard, subcontracts the production to someone else and then sells them under its own name, it's really their product, not (necessarily) an OEM product, just like a iPod is considered to be an Apple product even if they don't do the manufacturing. Nobody does mainstream manufacturing anymore. It just drags down margins.

 

[shiznit]

Emulation programmers needed for 360 backwards compatibility?

 

[nAo]

Emulation programmers needed for 360 backwards compatibility?

Software engineers at Intel need a LRB2 emulator to work on way before the real hardware gets in their hands.

 

[eastmen]

Emulation programmers needed for 360 backwards compatibility?

Well the xbox 360 already has live originals for download. considering the size of the 360 games will be about the same as the original xbox games , the size of the hardrive in the next xbox will most likely start out at 250gigs or more. So I can see it as a viable alternative of porting the gmes over

 

[shiznit]

Software engineers at Intel need a LRB2 emulator to work on way before the real hardware gets in their hands.

wouldn't that be a simulator?

 

[Arwin]

wouldn't that be a simulator?

No, emulator - it has to replicate the hardware behavior exactly in software. At least, that's what I understand is the difference between simulation and emulation.

 

[Scali]

The definition of an emulator is a hardware device that replicates the behaviour of another hardware device.
The definition of a simulator is a software program that replicates the behaviour of a hardware device.

Somehow, somewhere the definitions got mixed up, and most people today think that a software program is also called an emulator.
I know that when I was in university, they explained the difference, pointing out that the term 'emulator' was wrongly used sometimes.
It seems that by now the term 'emulator' is so widespread that it's hard to even find a proper definition of 'simulator' and 'emulator' on the web today.
But this Wikipedia page is pretty close:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_simulation
Or this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_architecture_simulator
That's what you do when you implement the logic of a chip (such as LRB2) in software.
It's just not linked from the Emulation article, as far as I could see.

 

[Humus]

I don't see why a emulator must be hardware and a simulator must be software. Anything that simulates would be a simulator, and anything that emulates would be an emulator, IMO. How it's achieved is not that interesting.

Webster btw:

em·u·la·tor
hardware or software that permits programs written for one computer to be run on another computer

 

[Scali]

I don't see why a emulator must be hardware and a simulator must be software. Anything that simulates would be a simulator, and anything that emulates would be an emulator, IMO.

Which begs the question: What are simulation and emulation?