Intel SOA Journal on Ulitzer

Intel has canceled Larrabee, its vaunted many-core graphics retort to Nvidia and the ATI side of AMD, because it wasn't competitive enough to best them.

The chip, Intel's first standalone discrete graphics chip and a test of its multi-core prowess, was already late, and hardware and software development had fallen behind schedule.

Intel says it's "absolutely committed" to the idea but with a different chip.

Larrabee was based on the x86 architecture to make it easier to program and reportedly could have had as many as 32 cores.

Embarrassed by the failure, Intel's decided to say nothing about its next step until it knows exactly what it is and has confidence it's on track. Mind you, it's been talking up Larrabee since early 2007.

Meanwhile, to salve its bruised ego, the company points out that the new Arrandale and Clarkdale Core processors due out early next year will integrate graphics into the CPU, but admits it's not the whiz-bang high-end graphics of the might-have-been Larrabee effort, although Larrabee's performance supposedly left analysts unimpressed when demoed at IDF in September.

Since the Larrabee had a heartbeat it will be used as a beta or SDK, an Intel spokesman said.

Intel will now have to concede the immediate future to AMD's Evergreen and Nvidia's prospective Fermi GPUs and pick a new battleground. AMD's first Fusion (GPU + CPU) products aren't expected until 2011.