Intel Kills Off Larrabee Discrete Graphics, For Real

LArrabee don't have to be GTX480 or 5870 fighter. A 5770 level video card with decent price + driver would still be welcomed in the market.

Good riddance, they could have at the least put out something even if it SUCKED that was fair priced would have been better than this. I still got a i740 agp and would have been nice to have added another discrete Intel gpu to my collection. 12 years and nothing new.

I really thought it was officially dead months ago...I was not aware that Intel considered it "shelved." I suppose this announcement equates to putting a bullet into the head of a wounded animal, lying on the ground, howling in pain, and yearning for a quick death. I never really had high hopes for Larrabee; the idea was a pipe dream at best, and smacked of insanity at worst. Competing with likes of ATI and Nvidia in the GPU market is just not feasible, unless Intel bought out a ton of talent from their competitors. Apparently, Intel did wise up and is sticking with dominating the processor market.

just another Duke Nukem Forever

It's always good when the plague known as x86 doesn't encroach on any new areas. Why Intel thought an instruction set considered poor 32 years ago, made sense for a modern GPU escaped a lot of people, considering compatibility wouldn't be such an important consideration there.

They'd be better off going with a clean, efficient instruction set if they ever try to get into that market again. How could they expect to compete with well-established players with that handicap?

I still don't know exactly what "we are focused on processor graphics, and we believe media/HD video and mobile computing are the most important areas to focus on moving forward" means. Processor graphics means the IGP that comes with the processor now? The other stuff also means that, even though discrete cards do that too? That's got to be it, but it's not too clear, really.

Does it mean that there will be no ray-tracing game in the near future? Quite sad if it's true, I really looked forward to see that and the day when programmer find more and more new rendering techniques (and of course read those in Tomshardware ^^).

Intel's Westmere IGP is already better than AMD's IGP, and competes well with low end discrete graphics. So with Sandy Bridge, Intel will probably be much better than AMD and Nvidia's IGP and compete with their future low-ends. Maybe Intel will actually make something that competes with their mid-range.

More competition please!, no less

Honestly they stuck graphics into a CPU that let's me play 1080p and bitstream TrueHD and DTS MA without the need for disrete graphics or a special sound card.

I'm happy larrabee or not

All I have to say is: HAHAHAHAHA. To Intel for talking all that smack before, and to all the people that were doing the same to nVidia and ATI.

Intel sucks at graphics. Intel GMA has been and looks like it will continue to be terrible. I had no expectations of Larrabee being anything spectacular but I was not expecting it to be such a colossal failure either.

That really blows...

I wasn't looking for a gaming card, I was looking for a parallel task cruncher that worked the same way things work now.

This leaves us with CUDA or OpenCL... which is the lesser of 2 evils? Proprietary format for Nvidia? Or "open" (I call preemptive BS) format by Apple.

As a contractor for Intel testing Sandy Bridge, I can't say much at all but indeed Bill Kircos is not lying when he says integrated graphics will be even better with Sandy Bridge...

Saw it coming. Not surprised at all.

Thus, Intel still sucks at graphics.

I was hoping that Intel could at least provide low-mid level performance and release such. Competition is always a good thing for the consumer and we could have expected Nvidia and ATI to respond with lower prices or more bang for the buck performance. This would have been beneficial to everyone even those who wouldn't have bought Intel's product.

nVidia's boss just jizzed his pants upon reading these news. Hopefully those two companies can go back to playing nice now.

Cant wait for the Nvidia cartoons

This makes sense with PC gaming kind of fledging and the real need for it covered by ATI and Nvidia. I think Intel just realized that this market did not need a third wheel.

intel graphic was just a junk , AMD and nVidia has the best , and even the VIA graphic is better than intel junk ...

They should have named it "Larrabye" in the first place.

It would be nice to see Intel in the GPU market, at least prices might be more reasonable.

They could have used the Itanium (IA64) architecture for Larrabee since they already have a compiler for that and the instruction set is not so bloated.

Unfortunate news.

Just the ridiculous notion of paying a few hundred bucks for a supercomputer-on-a-chip that could possibly give a 15 year old 10 million dollar Cray system a run for its money, at least for a few functions, sitting in my PC running games makes me smile. Could have been a fun toy for folding and other stuff too if a compiler was released for it.

But for a business perspective it makes no sense at all to go after gamers when you could sell the exact same chip to cloud companies like Google and Facebook, data centers, Universities or the military for $4000 per chip for HPCs that may incorporate anywhere from dozens to even thousands of CPUs.

I'm speculating, but if Larabee could allow Intel to build something that can keep up with Cray's Jaguar or IBM's Roadrunner at a much smaller size they would be swimming in new market share and revenue.

It has been said this was the original plan with Fermi before it became a gaming GPU, but I'm sure Larabee's networked x86 design would be more compatible with existing software and super computing infrastructure.

Good business decision, but I'm bummed none the less.

Title is misleading. It should be "Larrabee Kills off Intel Discrete Graphics" cause you know...it sucked.

Here is what i think REALLY happened, Larrabee is probably everything Nvidia and ATI feared it would be and more, because you dont pour that much money into R&D and publicize it before you have something tangible...but as usual, the three made a deal and colluded where the two GPU makers would give large sums of money to intel every year to keep a lid on the project or to "shelf" it for a given amount of time.
i know this sounds like a conspiracy to many of you out there, but the truth is that Nvidia and ATI have been price-fixing for a long time now and all of silicon valley knows it.

They were unable to solve the power/heat issues - it's really that simple. They had specifications for 5 versions of Larrabee going out to 2020. I know one of the many engineers working on Larrabee 2. They had FIVE floors of staff working on the various versions -- that's A LOT of R&D talent working on what really is not a very large nor very profitable market place.

Apple's success in the Mobile hardware market is a HUGE wakeup call for Intel, that's another reason why Larrabee is now dead. The real question -- is it too late for Intel to enter this market?

Using Microsoft to help with the software side of developing Tablet OS and/or other mobile devices isn't going to work as Microsoft simply can't make an small footprint (memory) and fast performing OS ... just too many layers and layers of compatibility in the code. The penalty of trying to retain ongoing compatibility for over 25+ years.

Apple's advantage is that they can control the hardware and software, this is a HUGE advantage. The very same advantage that many of you seem to hate for no real valid reason?? Apple's success comes from understanding that the end user really doesn't care what goes into a device so long as it works and delivers what they want ... and Apple have succeeded in doing exactly that ... and they've done it with Samsung CPU and PowerVR SGX licensed by Imagination Technologies and parts that have nothing to do with Intel's own designs.

Intel are now probably looking the market numbers and going ... "OH, this MobileDevice market is apparently bigger than we thought" they really don't have a strong foothold in that market.

And it really doesn't matter if you like Apple or not as this isn't about you, it's about the reality of supplying and demand.