Intel says Larrabee graphics were "impractical"
updated 01:30 pm EDT, Mon September 20, 2010
Larrabee graphics impractical, hungry, says Intel
More light on the reasons behind Intel's promised but shelved Larrabee discrete graphics platform have been revealed. At the Intel Developer Forum earlier this month, the company's director of Graphics Architecture Tom Piazza said Intel faced a performance per watt issue trying to deliver what Larrabee promised.
"I just think it's impractical to try to do all the functions in software in view of all the software complexity," Piazza said. "Naturally a rasterizer wants to be fixed function. There is no reason to have the programming; it takes so little area for what it does relative to trying to code things like that."
Larrabee was to be a fully programmable GPU architecture based on many small x86 cores and custom texture hardware. Piazza doubts that a Larrabee-based graphics product will ever reach the market. [via PCPerspective]
