IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 06/12/2009

Intel cancels Larrabee retail products, project lives on

Intel's Larrabee discrete GPU project has been rumoured to be on the ropes for a little while now, and it appears that the referee has finally called time - On consumer Larrabee products at least.آ However, Intel's project still rolls on, so don't be surprised if we see Larrabee (or a derivative thereof) appear on the scene to another round of fanfare in a few years time.

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.

The Larrabee project itself has not been canceled however, and Intel is still hard at work developing their first entirely in-house discrete GPU. The first Larrabee chip (which for lack of an official name, we’re going to be calling Larrabee Prime) will be used for the R&D of future Larrabee chips in the form of development kits for internal and external use.

The big question of course is “why?â€‌ Officially, the reason why Larrabee Prime was scrubbed was that both the hardware and the software were behind schedule. Intel has left the finer details up to speculation in true Intel fashion, but it has been widely rumored in the last few months that Larrabee Prime has not been performing as well as Intel had been expecting it to, which is consistent with the chip being behind schedule.

Anandtech has an excellent evaluation on the announcement, and the state of Larrabee as it stands.

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TSMC's 40 nanometre yield issues to continue into Q1 2010

If you're frustrated at the continuing shortages of AMD's high-end Radeon HD 5000 series products (and no doubt AMD are as much as anybody), then it appears that your frustration might well continue all the way until the second quarter of 2010 according to speculation, which ironically might serve as good news for NVIDIA's own Fermi graphics architecture.

TSMC's 40nm process maturity can simply be described as disastrously bad. According to our sources, yields are currently at around 50 percent, which is catastrophic for a "mature" and more than a year old process. One could say that TSMC is really immature about its 40 nm yields.


At this time, TSMC should be at 90 percent + yields, but this is simply not happening. The worst part is that nothing will change in early 2010. The shortage will last throughout Q1 2010 and both ATI’s RV870 and Nvidia’s Fermi will be heavily affected to their die size and complexity.

Fudzilla carries the story.

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