Modern GPUs have a wide range of power-saving features that can switch off unused parts of the GPU when you're, for example, just using Windows or when you're watching a movie and this allows for most graphics cards to hit very reasonable power levels in non-3D applications. However, we've been informed by a very reliable source that Intel's Larrabee won't support this kind of feature until the second generation of hardware.

As Fudo reported earlier, the card will draw 300W when it's running 3D applications, but it will draw over 200W doing pretty much anything and it won't be going lower than to about 100W even at idle. It really looks like Intel has messed up here and we'd expect this card to be wasting a lot of power and run quite hot even when it's not doing very much.

We're not sure how Intel missed to design in any kind of power management features and considering that Larrabee is based on multiple cores, we can't imagine that it would've been too hard to devise a way to at least disable a few of the cores when they're not needed.

So for those of you that have considered getting a Larrabee-based graphics card, you might do well to wait for the second generation of products to arrive, as hopefully by then, Intel will have added power-saving features.

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