What about Larrabee?
So we understand that NVIDIA thinks that GPUs are the future, but that’s hardly surprising.
But what about Larrabee as a GPU offering? ‘Larrabee only exists on presentation slides – we haven’t seen any hardware yet. So it’s very hard to draw any concrete conclusions,’ said Berraondo.
In spite of that, he did manage to draw one conclusion: ‘If you look at the way Larrabee works, it follows our lead and that is quite significant.’
Taking on NVIDIA and AMD in the GPU space is clearly important to Intel, as it has accelerated its development by at least two years in order to promise something tangible by next year.
Berraondo clearly thinks that may have implications of its own. ‘Intel has shortened the development period for Larrabee, so you have to wonder what compromises were made in order to achieve that.’
Good point, and you also have to wonder what kind of product might initially emerge from this hastened roadmap. Berraondo appears to think that getting the technology right might just be the start of Larrabee’s challenges.
‘Even if Larrabee does deliver on the technology side, things like drivers and developer tools also need to be right,’ he said. ‘Intel’s lack of infrastructure, time and experience in this field means there are bound to be teething troubles.’
