Larrabee "marching towards production" in 2010

 

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By Dave Stevenson

Posted on 16 Apr 2009 at 10:34

Intel's upcoming entry into the discrete graphics processing market, Larrabee, is "marching towards production" in early 2010, according to the company's CEO Paul Otellini.

Otellini revealed Intel's expectation during a conference call with journalists to discuss the company's first quarter earnings.

He says the "silicon will get ready, or get better, over the course of the year," and that he "[expects] volume introduction of this product to be early next year."

Larrabee is Intel's first discrete graphics chip, and has been described by Intel as a halfway house between a GPU and the traditional CPUs the company is known for.

"It looks like a GPU and acts like a GPU but actually what it's doing is introducing a large number of x86 cores into your PC," spokesperson Nick Knupffer told CNet.com last year.

Intel's approach to its first graphics chip isn't without risk. Last year, John Montrym, chief architect for Nvidia's GT200 core, told reporters "Every GPU we make, we always consider this type of design, we do a reasoned analysis, and we always conclude no. That's why we haven't built that type of machine... the reality is going to fall short of the optimistic way they've painted it."