Topic: Intel Cancels Larrabee Retail Products, Larrabee Project Lives On

[Rod ONeal]

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=659

:snip:
We just got off the phone with Nick Knupffer of Intel, who confirmed something that has long been speculated upon: the fate of Larrabee. As of today, the first Larrabee chip’s retail release has been canceled. This means that Intel will not be releasing a Larrabee video card or a Larrabee HPC/GPGPU compute part.

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This is too bad. I was hoping for more and better video cards and the benefit of increased competition. I've seen this sort of thing happen in other industries. I'll give you a possible scenario...

If mega-company A (in this case Intel) can't figure out how to produce something themselves, they go out and buy a smaller company that already makes what they are struggling to produce. This is just pure speculation, but if it happens you read it here first.

Nvidea is struggling to get their Fermi DX11 architecture to retail. ATI released their DX11 cards over 2 mos. ago. We still have no release date in sight for Fermi. Still months away, at this point. Nvidea could fall WAY behind ATI. Possibly releasing their 1st gen DX11 card while ATI is poised to release their next gen card. If this were to happen, Nvidia could get behind the 8 ball financially and Intel could buy them up.

Just some idle speculation, but stranger things have happened.

:edit:

Posted post before it was finished.

[Nemesis]

I really don't like Intel moving into video cards.  Their dominance in chip sets gives them the potential to mess too much with competition in the video card market by making changes that stop competitors cards from working but not their own. 

[Rod ONeal]

There is always that possibility. By chip sets, do you mean CPU or Mobo chip sets? As far as disabling competitor's cards/products goes, because of their dominance in the marketplace we already have Nvidea doing that. Thats one reason I was thinking we need more competition. That and if Nvidea doesn't come out with DX11 cards soon we're all going to continue paying way too much to upgrade to the latest designs.

[Nemesis]

Motherboard chipsets.  When AMD bought ATi Intel stopped supporting the ATi Crossfire system.

[Rod ONeal]

Motherboard chipsets.  When AMD bought ATi Intel stopped supporting the ATi Crossfire system.

Intel offers xfire support on a lot of their boards. The latest chipsets do both xfire and sli (x58-p55)

[Nemesis]

Motherboard chipsets.  When AMD bought ATi Intel stopped supporting the ATi Crossfire system.

Intel offers xfire support on a lot of their boards. The latest chipsets do both xfire and sli (x58-p55)

Things must have changed then.  When the AMD/ATi purchase happened Intel cancelled some of their cross licensing with ATi and dropped Crossfire at the time.  Maybe the anti trust lawsuit forced them to go back. 

[Tus-XC]

Motherboard chipsets.  When AMD bought ATi Intel stopped supporting the ATi Crossfire system.

Intel offers xfire support on a lot of their boards. The latest chipsets do both xfire and sli (x58-p55)

Things must have changed then.  When the AMD/ATi purchase happened Intel cancelled some of their cross licensing with ATi and dropped Crossfire at the time.  Maybe the anti trust lawsuit forced them to go back.

could also be they had to renegotiate the licence since it was with ATI originally, and they were bought out by AMD