We've provided a few snippets of information about Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics solution this week and although it's only snippets, it's given something of a clearer picture of what to expect. The only problem is that you'll have to wait until the summer of 2009 to actually get to see the hardware.
From what we've been told, Intel is planning to launch the card sometime next summer. Our best guess would be Computex, as Intel always announces some kind of new technology during the show; this year it was the nettop and netbook Atom processors, so why not a graphics card next year?
We were also told that Intel is expecting to have working cards ready by the end of this year, although we don't know in what stage of production readiness these samples will be; and from the information we've gathered, it sounds like Intel still has a lot of work to do. It's lucky that they've got almost a year to tune things out, as there are a lot of things that goes into making graphics cards. Just ask AMD and Nvidia how easy it is.
Intel is also going to have to make some working hardware ahead of time to hand out to those game developers to try their new games on, as they need to tune their games for this new approach to PC graphics. It would also be a good tool for Intel to go around to its potential partners with to promote the card. We can hardly wait to see the first benchmark figures, but we guess there's still some time to go before that'll happen.
Also read
Larrabee doesn't need DirectX
Larrabee will use GDDR5 memory
Larrabee will use a 12-layer PCB
Larrabee doesn't support power saving
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Graphics
Larrabee set to launch in summer 2009
Samples ready by the end of this year?