Intel may make the best high-end processors, but with the development of GPU from Intel problems. Due to the wide dissemination of Intel chipsets with integrated graphics, Intel is the largest supplier of graphics solutions, but the performance of these decisions is a big question. In 1998, Intel introduced the discrete GPU i740, in order to help promote the interface AGP, but his performance was so disappointing that he disappeared from the shelves in a very short time. Ten years later, the manufacturer tries to return to the discrete GPU with Larrabee, 32-nuclear 45nm GPU, which uses the instructions x86. However, this project is chronically delayed, and during that time, new high-performance versions of GPU from nVidia and ATI.

Intel decided to abandon the consumer version of GPU Larrabee, whose release was previously scheduled for next year. It was assumed that Larrabee will shake the market in two teraflops of performance, but ATI has overcome this barrier in the beginning of this year. Teraflop is 1 trillion floating point operations per second, the number of teraflop is a measure of performance for both the processors and chips for graphics cards.

Graphic unit showed 40 nm AMD Radeon HD 5870 with a 2.72 teraflop before Intel demonstrated a prototype of Larrabee at September's IDF. The recent launch of Radeon HD 5970 with a capacity of more than 5 teraflops was the last nail in the coffin of Larrabee. Intel decided that Larrabee simply can not compete with the decisions of other firms on price and performance.

"Technology and software for Larrabee's great late in comparison with our plans at this moment", ─ announced by Intel. ─ "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be presented as a separate discrete graphics product, but will be used as a platform for developing software for internal and external use." "While we are disappointed that product development is not at the stage where we expected, we remain committed to delivering our customers' multi-core graphics world-class. Future plans for the graphical output will be discussed somewhere in 2010", ─ reports manufacturer.

The first version of evolving the platform to be launched next year. before the manufacturer said that Larrabee would be just the first of multiple graphics processors. Larrabee had to unite the raw bandwidth of the GPU with the possibility of parallel programming, typical of the processor. Intel often talked about the functions of rendering, which is difficult to achieve in real time, in particular, the ray tracing and transparency, independent of the order. Theoretically, Larrabee will use a similar function.

Chip Larrabee, created under the Intel Terascale Initiative, based on the processor Pentium P54C. It contains a vector processing units to improve performance graphics and video applications. Kernels with support for Hyper-Threading will be able to handle up to four threads per core, which has its own set of registers to access memory. A short pipeline would provide quick access to the cache L1. All core Larrabee will have access to the separation cache L2, and cache coherency for all nuclei will maintain the integrity of data. Communication between all cores Larrabee will be a 1024-bit bi-directional ring bus.

Intel recognizes the importance of software and drivers for the success of Larrabee, that the Institute of visual computing Intel (Intel Visual Computing Institute) in. Germany. Laboratory conducts basic and applied research in the field of visual and parallel computing. As Intel have plans to release 48-nuclear version of Larrabee, made on 32nm process technology, in addition, the producer hints at the establishment in 2012, a more powerful version using 22 nm SOC process. While we can not see the products based on Larrabee, the abolition of consumer graphics processors Larrabee means that Intel will be able to use more resources to improve the 32nm integrated graphics, which will be used in future chips Sandy Bridge.