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:Great, just in time for Duke Nukem Forever!

[Shikaku]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of old memes. Oh wait, I don't have to, it's Slashdot.

Wow... shock horror

[Plasmoid2000ad]

I spent most of internship in intel arguing with people hyping larabee as the 2nd coming of jesus that it would never happen... And now i can finally say HAH!

Re:the performance is there

[Foredecker]

Vaporware is not faster than existing products.

Re:Oh rats

[chriso11]

NVidia hasn't let ATI do anything. Actually, NVidia is dealing with a series of problems - from serious packaging problems last year to TSMC yield issues now. ATI/AMD has been really effective lately; NVidia historically had a dominant position, but definitely not a monopoly, and I'll say that they have slipped a lot recently. Things change fast in the GPU race, so NVidia may recover quickly. But ATI/AMD have a solid amount of momentum, and the only real execution problem I've seen them make in the last few months in GPUs has been to rely on TSMC.

Take a look at the Dell Zino HD - it combines AMD's 'just enough CPU' with top end GPU to make a very compelling system. Intel has cut NVidia out of the chipsets, so they don't get the synergy that AMD has with ATI.

AMD is definitely better situated for the long haul than NVidia, and actually may be better off than Intel for complete systems.