Intel cans first Larrabee graphics chip

Posted on 7 Dec 2009 at 11:39

Intel announced that it has cancelled its Larrabee standalone discrete graphics chip because both silicon and software development are behind schedule.

"Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project," said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer in an interview with CNet. "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product."

Instead, Knupffer said that Larrabee would be used as a software development platform for internal and external use; the kit is expected next year.

Intel would not discuss what might happen to other versions of Larrabee, such as the high performance computing part, after the software development platform is released.

At last month's Supercomputing Conference, Intel CTO Justin Rattner showed Larrabee hitting one teraFLOPS in a HPC benchmark with some overclocking. In this test, Nvidia's Tesla C1060 hits around 360 gigaFLOPS, while the Radeon HD 5850 manages close to 750 gigaFLOPS.

The decision isn't entirely unexpected given how poorly the Larrabee demonstration at this year's Intel Developer Forum was received. Larrabee was originally expected in 2008 and was aimed squarely at graphics chips from ATI and Nvidia. Rumours suggest that Intel has sunk several billions into the project and still doesn't have anything to show for it.

Author: Tim Smalley

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