UPDATED: Rumour control: Larrabee based on 32 original Pentium cores

Posted at: 4:28pm 7th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Larrabee’s IA could be based on Intel’s old P54C architecture

UPDATE: Since we wrote this story yesterday, Intel has been in touch to point out that Heise was speculating about the type and number of cores used in Larrabee, and that neither Justin Rattner or Pat Gelsinger announces any details about the type or number of cores used in Larrabee.

German tech site Heise has speculated that Larrabee’s multiple IA cores will in fact be based on Intel’s P54C architecture, which was last seen in the original Pentium chips, such as the Pentium 75, in the early 1990s.

Of course, the cores will be a bit more sophisticated than that, and much smaller, as they will be fabricated on a 45nm process. Heise also reckons that the cores will feature a 512-bit wide SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) vector processing unit. The site calculates that 32 such cores at 2GHz could make for a massive total of 2TFLOPS of processing power.

Expreview also has a diagram of Larrabee (pictured below), which shows the layout of the PCB. The card features one 150W power connector, as well as a 75W connector. Heise deduces that this results in a total power consumption of 300W, along with 75W from the PCI-E slot, although it’s extremely unlikely that the card will max out every single power source. Even so, it’s going to eat a lot of power.

Via Heise (Babelfish translation)