News - Intel's Larrabee scrapped as consumer product, relegated to testing platform

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Burying bad news late on a Friday afternoon, Intel has announced its long awaited Larrabee chip is not only delayed, but will no longer be released as a consumer standalone graphics product.

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Originally Posted by HEXUS

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L8trB shift gears to NVRB.

Eerie echoes of Nvidia's fermi here. Good chip for hpc, less focus on consumer product. Though from the article it does seem like there's less light at the end of the tunnel for larrabee.

This is very good news for AMDs APU, and nVidia must be glad of the lifeline.

Its a real shame though. Eventhough the tides have been shifting quite nicely recently i still feel that market is in need of a bit more competition and if anyone was going to pull it off it was going to be intel.

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Originally Posted by Biscuit

Its a real shame though. Eventhough the tides have been shifting quite nicely recently i still feel that market is in need of a bit more competition and if anyone was going to pull it off it was going to be intel.

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Exactly. More contributiuon rather than less.

I disagree, intel need to lose a lot of market share in a lot of different areas, not gain share in even more.

This is strong evidence as to just how difficult it is to make a modern GPU at the performance levels both ATI and NVidia are currently producing. A Company with intel's engineering talent and huge resources still didn't manage to compete. It is also obviously very good news for both Nvidia and AMD. It will take pressure off their margins on any of their discrete graphics cards so they can continue to spend that money innovating.

I actually think Larrabee failing is good news for consumers as well. Intel already make plenty of money to keep making great CPU's. All another success would do is boost shareholder profits.
AMD is treading on thin ice and has been for 3 years now. Nvidia is currently in a spot of bother over their Fermi cards being so late and likely underperforming and the problems with some of their chips and heat. They have also taken a hit in their huge cash reserves.
Intel would have at least been likely to use their manufacturing and size advantage to sell larrabee at lower marginss than AMD and Nvidia to get more marketshare and dealt with the antitrust investigations later, hurting everyone but their shareholders.

I was actually waiting to see how this worked out! Oh Well!!

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Originally Posted by Jimbo75

I disagree, intel need to lose a lot of market share in a lot of different areas, not gain share in even more.

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I think this though is echoed in many walls.... especially in AMD owned halls...

By 'Larrabee will now be a test platform', they mean 'Larrabee is completely and utterly dead as a project and it's already buried' so they won't be doing anything more with it... Right? That's what I read it as.

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Originally Posted by badass

Nvidia is currently in a spot of bother over their Fermi cards being so late and likely underperforming and the problems with some of their chips and heat.

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Btw there has been nothing to suggest that Fermi is an underperforming card with heat problems. In fact there has been nothing to suggest anything at all. Which is probably even worse...

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Originally Posted by Zhaoman

Btw there has been nothing to suggest that Fermi is an underperforming card with heat problems.

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I don't think Badass was saying fermi had heat problems. I suspect he meant the issues Nvidia had with various (laptop?) cards melting the solder (bumps??) and so killing the cards. I think Nvidia had to right off a fair chunk of cash to replace cards & recall laptops. I seem to remember it was around 200 million, but not sure whether $ or £'s, & I could be wrong on all of this, particularly that last figure :)

Many were speculating LRB would be in the PS4, at least that nightmare is now not going to pass.

I guess cramming 32 Atom type cores with extended vector instructions simply is not enough to create a GPU that is on par with what AMD and NVIDIA have currently - let alone in the future.

There were some demonstrations of LRB recently showing some realtime raytracing and it was, in a word, pitiful.

Intel needs to be taken down a few notches... at least in the GPU market they have been.

Didn't see that coming, although I haven't been paying that much attention. Intel have been so successful of late, you just assume anything they do is going to turn to gold.