Working Prototype of Intel’s Failed Larrabee GPU Sells for $5,000 on eBay

Collectors of rare PC hardware have just missed out on the chance to own a little piece of history: a prototype Intel GPU claiming to be the only working Larabee board in the world. It sold on eBay France for a mere €4,650 ($5,234) and even came in a snazzy case.

Ian Evenden
Freelance News Writer

Ian Evenden is a UK-based news writer for Tom’s Hardware US. He’ll write about anything, but stories about Raspberry Pi and DIY robots seem to find their way to him.

  • Howardohyea
    really interesting in my opinion, nice to read about a bit of technical background about a piece of hardware instead of just "someone sold a GPU".

    The fact that Intel used CPU cores for graphics rendering is a really fast way to develop a graphics card, but yeah, the graphics only performance won't be good. That's why graphics cards are considered ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits)
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  • Historical Fidelity
    Very interesting article, I appreciate intel’s novel approach to their first foray into the graphics card segment
    Reply
  • DieReineGier
    This card woulkd complement my i740-based card that I bought on ebay too.

    The article leaves the impression that CUDA was influenced by Larrabee, but CUDA was first. Larrabee was started because Intel was afraid of loosing high performance computing market share to GPGPUs.

    Larrabee had its very own SIMD instruction set incompatible to any SSE or AVX implementation on regular Intel CPUs. Some instructions were kind of weird just to not infringe on patents held by others. Very interesting architecture. It actually ran flavors of BSD (I saw) and Linux (I heard of), some parts optionally had their own permanent storage and network connection!
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