Intel Scraps Larrabee

**Freddie** · December 07, 2009, 10:41 AM

We just got off the phone with Nick Knupffer of Intel, who confirmed something that has long been speculated upon: the fate of Larrabee. As of today, the first Larrabee chip’s retail release has been canceled. This means that Intel will not be releasing a Larrabee video card or a Larrabee HPC/GPGPU compute part.

The Larrabee project itself has not been canceled however, and Intel is still hard at work developing their first entirely in-house discrete GPU. The first Larrabee chip (which for lack of an official name, we’re going to be calling Larrabee Prime) will be used for the R&D of future Larrabee chips in the form of development kits for internal and external use.

The big question of course is “why?” Officially, the reason why Larrabee Prime was scrubbed was that both the hardware and the software were behind schedule. Intel has left the finer details up to speculation in true Intel fashion, but it has been widely rumored in the last few months that Larrabee Prime has not been performing as well as Intel had been expecting it to, which is consistent with the chip being behind schedule.

Bear in mind that Larrabee Prime’s launch was originally scheduled to be in the 2009-2010 timeframe, so Intel has already missed the first year of their launch window. Even with TSMC’s 40nm problems, Intel would have been launching after NVIDIA’s Fermi and AMD’s Cypress, if not after Cypress’ 2010 successor too. If the chip was underperforming, then the time element would only make things worse for Intel, as they would be setting up Larrabee Prime against successively more powerful products from NVIDIA and AMD.

You can read the full story here.

Well I can't say I'm surprised by this if I'm honest the only thing that's surprising is the length of time it's taken Intel to admit it. Put Larrabee into context, back in 2007 Intel said Larrabee was as fast as currant cards then last year Intel said Larrabee can be overclocked to give the peak performance of 1 Tflop which is the same a Radeon HD4870 and then a year latter AMD launches a video card that can deliver 2.13Tflops (Radeon HD5870). The delays in Larrabee deployment have cost it Intel but that's not to say Intel haven given up hope of launching a discrete Larrabee based card at some point in the future prehaps at some point when the 32nm process is in full swing in 2011.

I not sure how I feel about Intel dropping Larrabee, it would have been good for everyone to have a third player competing at the top end but given Intel's size and cash there was a possibility they could have swallowed the who market like they have with CPU's.

One last point I want to make is this just goes to show just how complicated and hard it is to develop new and competitive hardware against established companies like Nivdia and ATI, if Intel can't do it with all their expertise and money how does anyone else stand a chance (anyone remember XGI?) of breaking into this market.