Intel’s recent announcement to cancel the launch of advanced graphic chip based on its Larrabee design is definitely a setback for Intel’s incursion into graphics market but the news brings relief to the Nvidia and AMD who play duopoly in the graphics market.
Larrabee design project- a multi-core chip cable of super fast teraflop performance i.e. a trillion floating operations per seconds was announced by Intel in April 2007. Company was planning to launch the graphics card in the 2009-2010 timeframe. The product was expected to generate complex graphics for videogames and carry out other high-performance computing chores.
Company has not made an expected significant progress in its Larrabee silicon and software development at this point of project which compelled them to jump to a decision of scraping the plans for these graphic cards. As the delay in the project will only make it uncompetitive in the world graphics market.
Chipmakers have plans to use Larrabee as a software development platform which they will use internally and offer externally.