In a surprising bit of news from Intel, their GPU chipset codenamed “Larrabee” has been pretty much shut down. The part will come to market eventually, another delay pushes it somewhere into 2010, but won’t be a GPU but rather a multicore computing chipset.
Specifically, Larrabee v1 is so delayed that, at the time it eventually launches, it just won’;t be competitive as a discrete graphics part, so Intel plans to wring some value out of it by putting it out as a test-bed for doing multicore graphics and supercomputing development. Intel will eventually put out a GPU, but may not be the one we've been calling “Larrabee” for the past few years.
This falls in line with what I noticed of Rattner’s Supercomputing2009 keynote where he continued to refer to it as a computational accelerator, rather than a GPU.
via Intel’s Larrabee GPU put on ice, more news to come in 2010.
