Intel has taken great leaps with its integrated graphics circuits, but the Larrabee project is restricted to the Many Intel Cores project focusing on GPGPU applications. In a panel discussion the circuit maker clarified why Larrabee won’t be making it into retail, the architecture simply isn’t practical enough.
With Larrabee, Intel focused on making a fully programmable architecture with up to dedicated x86 cores. A design that works well with heavy workloads and can offer tremendous performance in the right applications, but the current graphics market is still very much focused on raster graphics. This makes today’s specialized calculation units better, you lose the broad functionality of a fully programmable architecture, but gain performance.
After a long development Intel realized that it could not keep uo with NVIDIA and AMD when it came to 3D performance. Thomas Piazza reasoned and explained why we won’t be seeing any Larrabee products in retail.
“I just think it’s impractical to try to do all the functions in software in view of all the software complexity,”[…]”And we ran into a performance per watt issue trying to do these things.”
Intel did not have the right balance between programmable and dedicated units, which means we will have to wait a lot longer for Intel to enter the discrete graphics card market.
