VR-Zone got some words that the Intel Larrabee discrete graphics card samples will be ready as early as Q3 this year and it will be shown to their closest partners only. We heard the Larrabee cards are slated for launch in Q2 2009, one year from now. Certainly, Nvidia is not giving up their discrete market share so easily and has been rallying their partners to get ready for the war next year.
We first told you about the Larrabee architecture more than a year ago and more details has been unveiled today. It is based on many mini IA cores design with a new hardware coherent cache architecture. Each core will support a new vector instructions including integer and floating point arithmetic, vector memory operations and conditional instructions. The key thing of this architecture is that it relies heavily on the software developed for it; eg. the games and the drivers. A well optimized game and drivers will enhance the performance and vice versa therefore Intel needs to work very closely with its software developers to optimize Larrabee performance. It is a good thing that Larrabee cards can support DirectX and OpenGL too.
