Intel Says Larrabee Was Just Too Complex And Power Hungry
Remember the Intel Larrabee project? It was Intel’s program that was commissioned to develop a consumer graphics card. Thomas Piazza, Intel Architecture Group Director, Graphics Architecture, spoke about the failings of Intel’s Larrabee graphics architecture at this year’s IDF. When asked if they ever expected to see a Larrabee-based graphics part coming out at all he said that he didn’t think so. RIP Larrabee, but for some reason we don’t think Intel is done with discrete raphics.
The project was canned due to numerous delays and poor performance, meaning that even if it finally did appear it would be several generations behind the GPUs of Nvidia and AMD. When asked why Piazza thought it had failed though he was surprisingly candid. “I just think it’s impractical to try to do all the functions in software in view of all the software complexity,” he explained. “And we ran into a performance per watt issue trying to do these things.
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