What Nvidia Had to Say About Larrabee's Delay

Making a parallel computing chip is hard, says Nvidia.

This past weekend Intel announced that its plans for the graphics processor codenamed 'Larrabee' have been put on hold.

Intel's Nick Knupffer said yesterday that the company had decided to delay plans for the graphics card because Larrabee's silicon and software development are behind where it had hoped they would be at this point in time.

This news boosted shares of Nvidia and AMD, thanks mostly due to Intel's delay in its plans to compete in the graphics space.

We were interested to find out what the major graphics players had to say regarding Intel's shift in plans for Larrabee.

"The fact that a company with Intel's technical prowess and financial resources has struggled so hard to succeed with parallel computing shows just how exceptionally difficult a challenge this is," said Victor Martinez, a spokesman for Nvidia.

Yesterday, AMD predictably told us that it was proud of having established both a CPU and GPU business.

"With only CPU, or GPU, a company is limited in its ability to respond to the needs of the industry," Dave Erskine, Graphics Public Relations of AMD, told Tom's Hardware.

Larrabee's architecture was different from today's GPUs because it was based on a Pentium P54C design uses the x86 instruction set.

"It really comes down to design philosophy," said Erskine. "GPUs are hard to design and you can’t design one with a CPU-centric approach that utilizes existing x86 cores."

Want to know what a premiere game developer thinks of Larrabee? Read Tim Sweeney's (of Epic Games and Unreal Engine fame) reaction here.

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