Posted on Wednesday, August 06 2008 @ 0:30 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Rumours
are spreading that Apple has already decided to incorporate Intel's Larrabee into its systems as soon as it becomes available as this new part might be a good match for the firm's Grand Central and OpenCL technologies.
With the hybrid design of Larrabee, the processor is more of a combination of a GPU and a CPU, which makes quite an ideal fit for Apple’s Grand Central and Open CL technologies that will be incorporated into Snow Leopard later in 2009. It would be natural for Apple’s OS to be able to utilize Larrabee to process more than just graphical data.
While the exact release date of Larrabee is not known yet, Intel has started to talk more about the project and the ability of the multi-core technology that will be featured in this product. Early reports have said that Larrabee is already on pace with current ATI and Nvidia offerings, but will offer the additional advantage of x86 support with context switching and preemptive multi-tasking, page swapping, and virtual memory support with full cache coherency. Of course, these features are not available in offerings from either ATI or Nvidia.
