Intel's Initial Larrabee Discrete Graphics Card Canceled

[Rob Williams]

Well, I have to admit that I wasn't expecting this... at least not so soon. Just earlier this week, I linked to a story which showed off Larrabee's impressive computational performance - it beat NVIDIA's highest-end GeForce GTX 285 by at least a factor of 2. Of course, such metrics don't easily equate with what we could expect from the gaming performance of the card, and as it appears now, it seems like there was a reason that Intel was giving off GPGPU numbers and not graphics performance numbers.

​

You can read the rest of our news post here.

 

[killem2]

Even though it wasn't exactly on par with the latest and greatest from AMD/NV, it still would have been extremely nice to have a third party in the competition. Hopefully they reconsider.

 

[Rob Williams]

I agree... more competition would be nice. From what I assume, this won't be the last of Larrabee. It will just be a while before Intel can put together a powerful enough product that has a chance of becoming real competition.

 

[Kougar]

Some sites have indicated they think Intel might try incorporating bits of Larrabee into future versions of Clarkdale/Arrandale in order to finally replace the old IGP they've been carting around for the last decade. I'm starting to think they might be right, given modern GPU's all but require flexible shaders, and Larrabee's units could double as such and more. It will be interesting to see where Intel goes with Larrabee in a few more years.

 

[Rob Williams]

I think that's the inevitable transition regardless. The design in IGP will be similar to the discrete cards... it's just that the discrete cards will be far, far more powerful. I'm not entirely sure we'd see results of this soon though... perhaps more with Sandy Bridge, and not Clarkdale. I could be wrong though...