An Intel spokesperson has admitted Intel falling behind the schedule in development of Larrabee, and said that Larrabee would initially be used as a software development platform for internal and external use than as a standalone discrete graphics product.

While chip industry holds that graphics processors must implement specialized rendering and mapping functions in purpose-built hardware blocks, Intel was planning to extend its general-purpose X86 processors into the graphics realm and thus create engine which is easy to build and leverages the Intel knowledge base. In simple architectural terms, Larrabee would take thirty-two X86 CPU cores and tie them together with a right amount of cache memory enabling fast, inter-processor communication.

At present both AMD and Nvidia are very aggressive with their products for mainstream computing arenas such as HPC space. While AMD has a development framework, based on the OpenCL standard, to allow the businesses to run in both GPU and CPU environments, Nvidia offers CUDA technology which integrates its graphic technology into mainstream computing environments. Also, earlier this year in November, during Supercomputing 2009, Nvidia unveiled its new Tesla GPUs (based on “Fermi” architecture), that offers a performance similar to a traditional CPU, but at a fraction of the cost and power.

While wealth of developer material on Larrabee on Intel’s forums provide credence to the thinking that Intel isn’t abandoning its hopes yet, the Nvidia user forums are rife with speculation about the fate of Larrabee.

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.