Intel postpones launch of Larrabee graphics architecture

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After a year of development since its first announcement, the graphic architectureLarrabee had its launch postponed by Intel last week. Expected to compete with advanced offers from ATI (a subsidiary of competitor AMD) and NVIDIA (its current rival in justice), it has not achieved the expected results for launch and does not reach the market as a commercial product, according to the company.

However, it will continue to be used internally by Intel as a platform for application development, which will also be available to developers in the form of a “kit” in 2010. Still, its commercial launch has been postponed indefinitely; Something strange, if we stop to think that it was officially demonstrated less than a month ago, at the Supercomputing Conference (SC) 2009.

In the initial plans, GPUs manufactured with the new architecture would have a design based on x86 processing cores, which would communicate with each other and facilitate work with simultaneous tasks in a way that, from a developer's point of view, would be easy to take advantage of in applications. At the same time, they would have a whole new set of instructions, capable of supporting chips with enormous computational power.

It was estimated that this power would reach several TeraFLOPS (that is, trillions of floating-point operations per second), but, according to an analyst at Jon Peddie Research, the reality of that promise stopped long before that. In a public demonstration made during SC 2009, a Larrabee chip reached 1 TeraFLOP in the choke, while Apple has already offered Mac Pro configurations with GPUs that surpass 1 TeraFLOP since the beginning of the year.

It is not the first time that the GPU market has heard of a delay in the development of the Larrabee architecture, but it looks like we will be out of the news for a long time. For now, Intel is working on delivering CPUs quad-core already with an integrated GPU for notebooks, but this type of graphic hardware is a job that she has mastered for some time.

(via CNET News)