Larrabee - Fermi : Has hardware been solved?

kyetech

Regular
Disclaimer: I am noobish and untechnical about graphics hardware, so I apaologies about my apparant lack of understanding.

To clarify what I understand:

I kind of sense that fermi is not a million miles away from what Larrabee is in spirit. Fermi has 16 main cores(streaming multi processors) with 32 fp units in each. I assume in some kind of crossbar architechture, acting as a general multi core procesor, not unlike the 32 cores in larrabee on a ring bus, but with 16 fp units.

I also believe that they are both flexible enough to support any programmig models and complex code (albeit without very good branch prediction). Although its unclear to me if each fermi core has some kind of in order main proccesing unit like larrabee does as each main core with pentium1 x86?
My questions are:

  • Does this mean that fermi and lrb could be considered solved in terms of architecture for graphics problems?
  • Does it mean that this hardware could support Mentalray, Renderman, and rendering systems that people like industrial light and magic might use for film rendering fully in hardware?
  • Are we at the point where all hardware needs to do is scale up (with smaller architectural changes). ie, in 6 years time we may have a similar architecture to Fermi/lrb but with 20 billion transistors instead of 3?
  • Am I way of base? Where is the GPU heading?
Id like to hear some thoughts from you lot.
 
Back
Top