14 DAY TRIAL // As some end-users may know, Intel tried to create a GPU based on the x86 architecture some time ago, but it ended up scrapping those plans and, now, confirming almost beyond any doubt that no actual Larrabee GPUs will ever see the light of dawn.
The Larrabbe was, essentially, Intel's project that was supposed to give it something to battle NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices on the video card front.
Intel even got around to demonstrating it at one point, only to eventually decide that the project was not viable.
Mostly, it seems that NVIDIA and AMD are too far along in their development of GPUs and that the x86 architecture is, simply put, not exactly suitable for graphics tasks.
Granted, the Larrabee did have special-function graphics hardware and had a higher degree of programmability.
Unfortunately, the Santa Clara, California-based outfit failed to strike a good balance between programmable and fixed-function blocks inside its GPU.
All in all, Intel has apparently admitted that the approach is impractical in the context of today's advanced graphics rendering technologies.
"I just think it is impractical to try to do all the functions in software in view of all the software complexity," said Thomas Piazza, the director of graphics architecture development at Intel architecture group, at IDF (Intel Developer Forum), according to a report made by Techradar web-site.
And we ran into a performance per watt issue trying to do these things," he added.
"[We were trying to find] what's the right level of programmability and what's the right level of fixed function. [...] Naturally a rasterizer wants to be fixed function,” Mr. Piazza added.
“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," he went on to saying.
Basically, Intel isn't going to unleash any discrete graphics solution based on the Larrabee any time soon.