Intel Confirms 'Larrabee' First Half 2010; No Delay

While many of us are running either an ATI or Nvidia GPU in our systems, the world’s largest maker of graphics chips is Intel.

Thanks to its integrated graphics, Intel’s GPUs are the most common ones on the market. They are, however, chosen for their cost and integration rather than performance. Intel is looking to change that with Larrabee, which will also be a GPGPU.

Intel spoke at the at the opening of Saarland University's Visual Computing Institute and revealed that Larrabee uses 32 processor cores and mates each of these with its own vector math unit, according to Guru3D.

German site PCGamesHardware also has a blurry picture of the Larrabee die, which shows each of the processor cores along with cache memory and a memory interface.

Guru3D noted in its story that Intel's Joseph Schultz said Larrabee was pushed back from its original target, but we spoke to Intel to get the full story.

“There is no delay. We always said it would launch in the 2009/2010 timeframe,” an Intel representative told Tom’s Hardware. “We are narrowing that timeframe to the 1st half of 2010.”

“Larrabee is healthy and in our labs right now,” added the representative. “There will be multiple versions of Larrabee over time. We are not releasing additional details at this time.”