Larrabee alive and well...

I AM NOT sure why the technical world suddenly all came to the same misunderstanding that Intel's Larrabee is dead, it most assuredly is not. In fact, if you actually read the not-an-anouncement from Intel yesterday, you will see that it simply does not put the knife in, but rather brings a lot of clarity to the chip's position.

What am I talking about? Last December, Intel did the right thing and pulled the plug on the consumer version of Larrabee. They explicitly did NOT pull the plug on the whole program, and left the door open to market a version of it for HPC use. As we wrote at the time, "In a statement today, Intel said that the chip will be a development platform and an HPC part, but there will be no retail version, at least not any time soon."

Today, Intel announced that Larrabee would be released as an HPC part, with an announcement next week, but there would still be no consumer part. In effect, they said EXACTLY what they said in December, but added in more specificity about when it would be released as an HPC part. Basically they confirmed that it was alive, and that it would be out soon in the form that they promised it would be.