Intel Kills Consumer Larrabee Plans

An anonymous reader tips news that Intel has canceled plans for a consumer version of their long-awaited and oft-delayed Larrabee chip, opting instead to use it as a development platform product. From VentureBeat: "'Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,' said Nick Knuppfler, a spokesman for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. 'Larrabee will not be a consumer product.' In other words, it’s not entirely dead. It’s mostly dead. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, it will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. But Knuppfler said that Intel will continue to work on stand-alone graphics chip designs. He said the company would have more to say about that in 2010."

Comments

Larrabee = Graphics Chip competing w nVidia

[billstewart]

In case you've forgotten what a Larrabee was (like I had), it was Intel's planned graphics / vector processing chip, competing with nVidia and AMD / ATI graphics systems. Here's the Wikipedia article.

Re:Oh rats

[TeXMaster]

I might agree with you if ATI/AMD would finally get serious about producing drivers that aren't complete crap. Their hardware is fine, but Linux drivers, as well as OpenGL drivers on Windows just plain suck.

It's not just the video drivers. ATI also has a horrible software stack (SDK, runtime, compiler and documentation) for their Stream GPGPU computing architecture, which is why everybody uses NVIDIA and its excellent CUDA. Generally speaking, ATI has excellent hardware, but such hardware is useless if you don't have a matching software to exploit it.

Re:Oh rats

[pjbass]

Don't forget about the NVidia Ion platforms. They also use a "just-enough" CPU in Intel's Atom, with higher end NVidia GPUs to run nicely integrated HD set-top boxes. Nice little platforms for MythTV frontends.