• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Intel Shelves Larrabee as a GPU Architecture

Soldato
Joined
6 Oct 2007
Posts
23,115
Location
North West
Intel has once again shelved plans to come back to the discrete graphics market, with the much talked about GPU codenamed Larrabee. In a recent post by Director, Product and Technology Media Relations Bill Kircos on the company blog, it was detailed that the company's priorities at the moment lie with releasing industry-leading processors that have the graphics-processing horsepower for everyday computing. The Intel HD graphics will only get better with the 2011 series of Core processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, where the iGPU core will be completely integrated with the processing complex.

In a nutshell, Intel has three visual computing efforts. The first is the aforementioned processor graphics. Since we began integrating graphics inside our chipsets back in 1999 (and now integrate graphics inside our processor products), the majority of PC users are now using integrated solutions. Second, for our smaller Intel® Atom™ processor and System on Chip efforts, and third, a many-core, programmable Intel architecture and first product both of which we referred to as Larrabee for graphics and other workloads. Here’s the latest:

1. Our top priority continues to be around delivering an outstanding processor that addresses every day, general purpose computer needs and provides leadership visual computing experiences via processor graphics. We are further boosting funding and employee expertise here, and continue to champion the rapid shift to mobile wireless computing and HD video - we are laser-focused on these areas.

2. We are also executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips. This server product line expansion is optimized for a broader range of highly parallel workloads in segments such as high performance computing. Intel VP Kirk Skaugen will provide an update on this next week at ISC 2010 in Germany.

3. We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market, at least in the short-term. As we said in December, we missed some key product milestones. Upon further assessment, and as mentioned above, we are focused on processor graphics, and we believe media/HD video and mobile computing are the most important areas to focus on moving forward.

4. We will also continue with ongoing Intel architecture-based graphics and HPC-related R&D and proof of concepts.

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2010/05/an_update_on_our_graphics-rela.php
 
Last edited:
So its dead in the water basically... would be a shame if they drop it entirely tho a 3rd player in the market would be good for everyone.
 
Short term for tech companies, is 6-18 months, longer term than that, he didn't rule out. Same news they've announced before, though a slight leaning towards suggesting , well, intergrated gpu is more important, which it clearly is.

But frankly, if you can get a well designed low end gpu designed, one scaled higher with a bigger core isn't particularly difficult. You either have an efficient gpu design, or you don't, if you do it should be efficient on the low end, and the high end.

At the moment AMD has an incredibly bright future in terms of cpu's with gpu's on die, because they just, well, own Intel in the gpu area.

Both companies are moving to take the low end completely as on die chips, AMD aren't far from getting a massive increase in production capacity so AMD having a significant advantage could take a decent amount of market share away from Intel(decent amount being, a few percent, its not going to jump to 50/50 overnight). SO obviously their focus right now is making their on die gpu's asap.

I'd be surprised if a decent gpgpu, or on die gpu, would be bad at gaming but great at everything else, simply due to the reasons gpu's are fast at gaming.

EDIT:_ Also smells to me something like lowering expectations, the problem with announcing Larabee the way they did is, average joe thought they would next gen have a product directly competitive with AMD/Nvidia, that simply won't happen for several generations.
 
Sure the project hasn't been entirely shelved, they've pulled a lot of R&D out the project thats been useful in other areas and continues to be so - but Larrabee as a gaming or even mid-range GPU is very much not going to happen any time soon.
 
Back
Top Bottom