Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Remembering that the Intel Itanium was supposed to be a ground-breaking departure with the past, can Larrabee be all that and more for graphics? Itanium is still not what Intel had hoped. And poor early adopters are still buying new and vastly over-priced minor incremental revs of the same CPU architecture to this day. Given the delays (2011 is now the release date) and it’s size (650mm^2) how is Intel every going to make this project a success. It seems bound for the the Big Fail heap of the future as it bears uncanny resemblances to Itanium and the Intel i740 graphics architecture. The chips is far too big and the release date way to far into the future to keep up with developments at nVidia and AMD. They are not going to stand still waiting for the behemoth to release to manufacturing. I just don’t know how Larrabee is ever going to be successful. It took so long to release the i740, that the market for low end graphics GPUs had eroded to the point where Intel could only sell it for the measly price of $35 per card, and even then no one bought it.

According to current known information, our source indicated that Larrabee may end up being quite a big chip–literally. In fact,we were informed that Larrabee may be close to 650mm square die, and to be produced at 45nm. “If those measurements are normalized to match Nvidia’s GT200 core, then Larrabee would be roughly 971mm squared,” said our source–hefty indeed. This is of course, an assumption that Intel will be producing Larrabee on a 45nm core.

via Intel’s ‘Larrabee’ to Be “Huge” – Tom’s Hardware.