Larrabee Exists – In Some Form

The Larrabee chipset, Intel’s GPU that is supposed to take on the likes of ATi and nVidia, was shown at IDF 2009, taking it out of the vaporware category.

That’s the good news.

The not so good news is that it was not much more than a working sample, with less emphasis on the working, and more on the sample.

from PCWorld

During the second IDF 2009 keynote, by Sean Maloney (Exec. VP and General Manager of Intel Architecture Group), we were briefly treated to the first public demonstration of Intel’s upcoming enthusiast GPU code-named Larrabee. Intel has stated in the past that Larrabee based products are expect at the end of 2009 or early 2010, but if its debut is any indication, it looks like they still have some work to do.

The reviewer continues with the fact that the audience was a bit underwhelmed, not the way to bring on confidence that you have the ‘destruction of nVidia’ in your hands.

Beyond that, Intel revealed almost nothing. No die sizes, number of cores, clock rates, or performance in traditional DirectX or OpenGL games. The most interesting tidbit seemed like an afterthought at the end of the demo, when Maloney casually mentioned, “We’ll be incorporating this into a future CPU, at some point.” This is the first confirmation of what we’ve assumed all along: that some sort of Larrabee derivative is destined to be integrated into future Intel CPUs as the integrated graphics solution. Is Larrabee (in some form) destined to be the IGP for Sandy Bridge, the next-generation Intel CPU architecture due in late 2010?

The problem about the incorporation is that AMD / ATi is claiming to be way ahead on this one, and from the claims of the 5xxx series GPUs, it would appear that they might be powerful enough to run an emulator for the x86 instructions alongside video instructions, and still be competitive with Intel’s Atom solutions. They certainly could not compete in electrical efficiency.

As I reported last week, it was the lack of progress on Larrabee that prompted several shake ups at Intel, and this sample’s lack of progress fairly well nails that idea.

could this be found on your next video card? Yes, provided you are willing to wait…

I have no desire for the destruction of nVidia, because, whatever else anyone thinks, notwithstanding the braggadocio of its leader, the company gets things right, including the drivers. It reminds me of the days when everyone seemed to have a new idea about graphics, and yet Tseng Labs always seemed to have the cards and drivers that just worked.

So Intel, by doing well, should chase the leaders, and perhaps nip a bit at the heels of AMD, so that those driver writers will get on the stick, and develop something that just works, like they should.

Intel will get it, that’s for sure. In that respect they are like Microsoft – they don’t abandon a project once started. So Larrabee will come. The bet is when.

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