How Larrabee Renders Graphics

Back before there were dedicated graphics processors, graphics was rendered by the CPU (software rendering). Then came the fixed-function graphics processors that did everything using simple pipelines. More recently, graphics processors evolved into more complex devices with some programmable stages.

The Larrabee is a step forward as well as a step backwards. It allows both a fully programmable graphics pipeline as well as "old-fashioned" software rendering, which would rely on its many cores and custom programming to get the job done.

Performance Scalability

As Larrabee essentially is a software graphics rendering solution, it scales extremely well with the number of cores used. Here are the results of Intel's tests of three games using up to 48 Larrabee cores.

Of course, the Larrabee is a CPU first and foremost, so here are the scaling results of a select choice of multi-threaded applications. However, you should remember that most office applications and games still are not capable of making full use of quad-core processors. Unless that changes, those applications and games will not benefit from the numerous processing cores in the Larrabee processor.

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