Intel's 'Larrabee' on Par With GeForce GTX 285

Traveling to Taiwan for Computex usually yields a lot of components, future launches, and lots of random hardware.

This time however, we waned to find out a little bit more about what Intel had up its sleeve for Larrabee--the company's next generation graphics solution, that's suppose to blow the water out of everything in the market.

According to one close Intel partner that wished not to be named, this isn't the case. We were told that Larrabee is currently only capable of performance levels similar to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285. While this isn't a bad thing in by any measure, it doesn't quite line up with a lot of the heat that we've been told.

The partner said that with current Larrabee silicon, things may change down the line, but it did not expect Intel's graphics solution to take the high-end of the market. At the time of Larrabee's release, both AMD/ATI and Nvidia will introduce newer and faster versions of its GPUs. Despite this, it's still important to keep in mind that Intel has always been an enabler of technology, pushing other industry leaders to adopt new technology. This was the case with Intel's infamous i740.

Intel told us several weeks ago that Larrabee would be taking the same approach as Intel's SSD drives. Silent. No frills. But market dominating when released.

At this point, we still think it's a bit too early to draw very solid conclusions, but, this is what we were told.