Intel Cancels Larrabee GPU, Focuses on Future Graphics Projects

From DailyTech: Intel Corporation may make some of the best CPUs out there, but it has had limited success in making GPUs. It is the largest supplier of computer graphics thanks to its integrated chipsets, but performance has always been a big problem. It introduced the i740 discrete GPU in 1998 to help popularize the AGP interface, but disappointing performance meant that it disappeared from shelves after only a short while on the market.

A decade later, the company had hoped to make a discrete GPU comeback with Larrabee, a 45nm 32-core GPU which would use x86 instructions. However, the program has been chronically postponed even as advanced new GPU designs from ATI and NVIDIA have come on the market.

Intel has now decided to cancel the consumer GPU version of Larrabee which was supposed to have come out next year. It was supposed to feature two teraFLOPS of performance, but ATI broke that barrier earlier this year. A teraFLOPs is 1 trillion FLoating point Operations Per Second, and is an indicator of CPU and GPU performance.

AMD's graphics division launched the 40nm Radeon HD 5870 with 2.72 teraFLOPS just before Intel showed off a prototype of Larrabee at the Intel Developer Forum in September. The recent launch of the Radeon HD 5970 with over 5 teraFLOPS was the final nail in the coffin. Intel decided that Larrabee just wouldn't be able to compete on price or performance.

"Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project," stated Intel in a email to DailyTech.

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