Intel Larrabee

[W1nTry]

Nvidia to make chipsets for Via CPUs

Enough with the buyout rumours already!

By Charlie Demerjian: Tuesday, 25 March 2008, 2:43 PM

IN A SURE SIGN of the coming apocalypse, Nvidia is going to make chipsets for Via CPUs. If you remember, Via closed down its chipset division, and NV needs to find a CPU partner it hasn't terminally pissed off.

Not much more to say to it than that. NV can't buy Via (allcaps) for a number of reasons, so this is the only door open for the chipset guys. A close working relationship or partnership makes sense for a lot of reasons, and could greatly benefit both sides. All the rumours of buyout talks for the last week were just rumours, this is what was happening behind closed doors.

[TriniXaeno]

It's the end of days! lol

In other interesting chip news, did you know that AMD has a chip codenamed Trinidad? One of it's Turions?

[Arcmanov]

No kidding...check it out.

[Spazosaurus]

I'm sorry...did he say ?VIA? cpu's?

Buying VIA could indeed be a good move. If they (nv) start making CPU's, its not inconceivable that they're gonna be the next Intel in years to come. Nv would no longer have to suck up to Intel because they're going to be doing EVERYTHING under one roof with the masses seeing systems with Nvidia CPU's, GPU's and chipsets...my word. Buying VIA would make much more sense than buying AMD granted they could do the needful (transform via into a performance chip maker).

[Saxito Pau]

they could name the chip nVIA (envy ya)

[Fkacn_tt]

Intel has unveiled details of the chip that will spearhead its move into computer graphics. It has revealed blueprints for the Larrabee chip that is scheduled to first appear in finished products in late 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee will be a stand-alone graphics processor unlike the onboard chips it produces for many PC makers. The move will bring Intel into direct competition with graphics specialists Nvidia and the ATI division of AMD. Intel is aiming to put Larrabee into graphics cards for PCs that help show games and video in very high detail. Like existing graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI, Larrabee is expected to have many separate processing cores onboard.

So far Intel has not said how many processing cores Larrabee will have onboard at launch or in subsequent generations. Future Nvidia and ATI graphics chips are expected to be made up of several hundred cores. While Intel will initially target the PC graphics card market, it expects the raw computer power in the chip to help with oil and gas exploration, medical imaging and financial services in the future. Many scientists and researchers already use coupled graphics cards as a desktop supercomputer that helps them carry out simulations far faster and cheaper than on a larger dedicated machine. Intel said it would release more details about Larrabee at the upcoming Siggraph computer graphics conference due to be held in Los Angeles from 12-15 August.

[Spazosaurus]

Well, Larrabee has been delayed...again...not that we were piling our hopes on top of this one.

[W1nTry]

Funny the article says Nvidia loves this news and not DAAMIT as well... ah well, I wasn't expecting anything much from it, and competition is pretty healthy with the green and red... err green so small thing imho

[W1nTry]

Just some more press on it:

Intel shelves consumer Larrabee
Delayed not cancelled
By Nick Farrell
Monday, 7 December 2009, 11:45

INTEL HAS DELAYED plans to market the consumer version of its Larrabee graphics processor less than three months after it showed off the chip at the Fall Intel Developer Forum.

Chipzilla reportedly decided to shelve the project for now because it has not got far enough fast enough to become a viable product soon. Larrabee was supposed to be in the shops next year.

The move means that Intel's push into the consumer videogame and parallel computing arenas has stalled. It leaves those fields open for Nvidia and AMD, which are pushing their products into these market niches.

However Intel is apparently not abandoning its plans for Larrabee to make a splash in the high-performance computing (HPC) market.

At the Supercomputing show last month, Intel demonstrated an over-clocked Larrabee graphics processor managing a teraFLOPS processing speed.

Intel does not foresee strong demand for graphics processors in mainstream computing in the near term and thinks that its eight-core Nehalem EX processors will be able to handle most highly parallel workloads.

Larrabee will be still be available as a platform for developers to design applications for parallel computing workloads and HPC but it will not see the light of day in the consumer market next year, an Intel spokesman said. µ