December 07, 2009

Intel has announced that it will dump its plans to launch discrete GPU codenamed Larrabee. As of now, both AMD and Nvidia will be happy to hear that no consumer version of Larrabee graphics chips would be out. Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer justified this move by stating that Larrabee's silicon and software development was lagging behind than where it was assumed to be at this point in the project.

ATI's new Evergreen family of Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards is being pointed to have destroyed Intel's plans. The all new dual-GPU on single PCB (printed circuit board) based ATI Radeon HD 5970 boasted of beastly over 5 teraFLOPS (teraFLOPS is one trillian Floating point Operations Per Second). While Intel's Larrabee was supposed to feature two teraFLOPS of performance and would never would make up to that performance at low price point.

Hence, Intel decided not to launch an uncompetitive product while the counterparts are already leading. However, Intel plans to release Larrabee product as software development platform for high performance computing and graphics development segments. At the recent Intel Developer Forum 2009, a ray tracing demo over Larrabee was shown and this shows that when out, Larrabee can be used for gaming-graphics development.

ATI is leading with DirectX 11 supporting hardware graphics race at the moment and Nvidia aims to launch its Fermi architecture GPUs. Apart from that, AMD is pulling up sleeves to launch its ambitious project Fusion that crams GPU with CPU on the same die. AMD Fusion is expected to arrive in mid 2011.

Source:-http://www.techtree.com