Intel Larrabee is a highly flexible, but also very powerful piece of silicon. At least if we’re to believe the slide shows. The chips has been rumored to appear in late 2009, and this is now confirmed by TG Daily, which has looked at some internal Intel documents. Intel will evidently present the fully-fledged high-end Larrabee chip at Intel Developers Forum in San Fransisco, September of 2009.
The high-end Larrabee is not intended for desktop usage though, but as server acceleration of some sort. We will just have to wait and see exactly what. The bits we know about the multi-core architecture so far tell us that it can be used for a variety of things, not just graphics.
Six months after IDF San Fransisco we should see the first desktop parts. These will evidently be stripped down version of the high-end part and will be fitted inside desktops and notebooks. Perhaps the Intel 6 series chipsets will be first from Intel to offer playable framerates?
The exact architectural design remains illusive, but anything from 4-24 IA cores seem to be in the works. GDDR5, which should be rather old by 2010, and a broad memory bus will supply the cores with enough bandwidth for flinging out pixels onto your screen.
Not surprisingly, the exact performance is just as illusive as the architecture, but considering there’s more than a year to go before the first Larrabee product will be displayed we’re happy with what we know for now. More information should surface as we approach the launch.
