Nvidia: Larrabee is a reaction to CUDA

Posted at: 4:26pm 21st July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Nvidia responds to Pat Gelsinger’s comments about CUDA being just a ‘footnote’ in computing history

Intel may have put the wind up the graphics business with the development of its Larrabee graphics chip, but Nvidia reckons that Larrabee is just a reaction to what Nvidia has already achieved with its GPGPU CUDA technology. What’s more, the comments from Intel’s Pat Gelsinger earlier this month have also stirred up a debate about the future of multi-core programming.

Nvidia’s general manager of its GPU computing group, Andy Keane, told Custom PC that the high level of interest in CUDA 'is causing Larrabee. Larrabee’s the reaction.’ He then added that ‘these comments from Gelsinger; if we were not making a lot of headway do you think he’d even give us a moment’s notice? No. It’s because he sees a lot of this activity. The strategy is to try to position it [CUDA] as something scary and unique, and it’s really not; it’s something that’s very accessible.’

Gelsinger said that CUDA would end up in the ‘interesting footnotes in the history of computing annals – they had great promise and there were a few applications that were able to take advantage of them.’ He then added that ‘generally an evolutionary compatible computing model, such as we’re proposing with Larrabee, we expect will be the right answer long term.’

However, Nvidia says that Gelsinger’s comments were misleading. ‘We use common languages,’ says Keane, ‘and this is where the Gelsinger information is totally misinformed, because it [CUDA] is standard C. It is actually the open 64 compiler which was originally designed for the Itanium – that’s our compiler. We’re actually using a CPU compiler, but we’ve given it a set of rules that basically say “if you write your program this way, it will scale across a few cores, or hundreds of cores.”’

‘Industry standard languages always live,’ added Keane, ‘that’s kind of the misinformation from Gelsinger. We’re just C, and CUDA’s just a set of rules around C.’ Keane was also keen to point out that Intel was also behind the times when Anwar Ghuloum, a principal engineer with Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, said: ‘developers should start thinking about tens, hundreds, and thousands of cores now.’