A closer look at the Larrabee New Instructions

To understand what Larrabee is, it helps to understand why Larrabee is. Intel has been making single cores faster for decades by increasing the clock speed, increasing cache size, and using the extra transistors each new process generation provides to boost the work done during each clock. That process certainly hasn't stopped, and will continue to be an essential feature of main system processors for the foreseeable future, but it's getting harder. This is partly because most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and partly because processors are starting to run up against power budgets, and both out-of-order instruction execution and higher clock frequency are power-intensive..