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Desktop Larrabee is 2010

by on11 November 2008

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Workstation iteration in 2009


We learned that desktop iteration of Larrabee will launch in 2010 and not before. The version for late 2009 will be a workstation product, as it's easier to make an OpenGL driver than a driver that should play thousands of games in both OpenGL and more dominant DirectX mode.

Intel has the nasty job of making a driver that will be compatible with thousands of games that are out today, but it will mainly focus on a few dozen titles that will be dominant at the time of Larrabee's birth.

Larrabee will have 32 to 48 cores and, according to a Siggraph presentation, at 1GHz clock it scales rather well and plays Half life 2 and Gears of War 2 at a decent frame rate. These scores are, of course, preliminary, as there is still no real Larrabee hardware and all projections are simulations.

We were also told that Larrabee will come as a high-end desktop part; but we also learned that if you reduce the number of cores you can make a mainstream and a low-end product. Hypothetically, 48 cores might be a High-end, 32 core Larrabee for mainstream and 16 cores for low-end, or something similar to this scenario.
Last modified on 12 November 2008
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