larrabee posts

Late last week Intel announced that it was canceling plans to release a commercial graphic card and chip based on their Larrabee technology. One of the reasons this news was game related was the speculation surrounding Project Offset, a fantasy FPS under stealth development for some time at Offset Software. Intel bought the dev team back in February 2008 and many speculated that the game would be used by Intel as a way to show off what a Larrabee graphics chip could do for game development and performance.

So with this new Larrabee development, where does Project Offset now stand? Big Download contacted Intel and one of their reps responded back with a brief statement, saying only, "Expect an update in 2010 regarding Offset. " Hopefully that means the project isn't canceled.

For the past few years PC processor maker Intel has been preparing a high-end graphics chip code named "Larrabee" that it hoped would be used for, among other things, high performance in PC games. Now it looks like those plans have been shut down, most likely for good. As reported by VentureBeat, Intel has now admitted it has canceled plans for a consumer product based on the Larrabee design. Intel still plans to release a stand alone graphic chip product and it says it will reveal more about its plans in that area in 2010.

While Intel stated that Larrabee will still live on as a software development platform, it's clear that its plans to go up against Nvidia and AMD on high-end PC gaming graphics have suffered a major blow. Intel has also been developing a game under the code name of Project Offset. While its development has been in stealth mode for most of its life, some have speculated the game's development was being used to help market the Larrabee graphics chip. It's currently unknown what the current status of Project Offset is.

While AMD is launching their DirectX11 graphics chip today (and we presume Nvidia has plans of their own for new products) Intel has been working on their own dedicated PC graphics chip which has gone under the code name or Larrabee. This week the company showed off the first public demo of their technology at their Intel Developer Forum.

As you can see from the brief video above, Intel choose to use a modified version of a PC game to demonstrate their chip's support for ray tracing. The game is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Intel actually took all of the content in the game and put it into its ray tracing tech to run on Larrabee. The result shows a more realistic looking level landscape along with some spectacular water textures. Larrabee is not expected to be released by Intel until sometime in 2010.

While Intel's integrated graphics chips are used a lot, gamers who like the high end PC hardware rigs need stand alone graphics chips. In this area, Nvidia (with their Geforce brand) and AMD (via their ATI Radeon brand) have ruled the roost with their products. Now Intel's 800 pound gorilla is planning to finally enter the PC graphics wars in force.

News.com reports that Intel plans to release their own stand alone graphics chip, currently code-named Larrabee. An Intel spokesperson states, "It looks like a GPU and acts like a GPU but actually what it's doing is introducing a large number of x86 cores into your PC.' According to the article the chip could have dozens and eventually hundreds of processor cores and won't need anything special to run things like DirectX which means existing games will be able to be run on PCs with the Larrabee chip. There's no word on when the first version of the chip will be released