First Larrabee Die Shot Breaks Cover

A die shot of Larrabee, one of Intel's most anticipated products to date, has recently surfaced on the Internet, confirming that the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker is currently planning the official unveiling of its first discrete graphics product. The detailed image of the company's upcoming chip has been reportedly showcased by Intel's Justin Rattner at the opening of the Intel Visual Computing Institute at Saarland University, Germany.

 

According to a recent article on PC Games Hardware, the Die shot was made public by Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, who explained the power requirements of Visual Computing. Although no specific details were given on said chip, Intel's CTO presented the Nehalem and Larrabee chips as possible solutions designed to meet the specific power requirements mentioned above.

 

PC Perspective, which also picked up on the story, speculates that the die shot shows 32 cores with 32 vector processing units and the presence of cache, which could end up as the memory logic of the chip. However, these details are yet to be confirmed, as they are only assumptions, at this time. However, PC Perspective further investigated and allowed Intel to comment on the story, which replied saying, “Justin Rattner did show what the silicon looks like. Larrabee is healthy and in our labs right now. There will be multiple versions of Larrabee over time. We are not releasing additional details at this time.”

 

According to previous rumors, Larrabee is expected to make its debut in early 2010, coming with an architecture that features between 32 to 64 cores and being manufactured using 45nm process technology. There are only a few details on the upcoming chip, but the world's leading chip maker is confident in its performance potential. With Larrabee, Intel hopes to take some of the market away from its major rivals, NVIDIA and AMD.