The gray beards in the audience might remember the Intel Paragon project back in the early 90’s. It seems that Intel is back in the business [at least for now] in focusing products and projects directly at the supercomputing industry. Brooke Crothers of CNET News relayed details from the blog site of Intel spokesperson Bill Kircos. From the looks of it, Intel is spinning off the Larrabee project into something specific for HPC.
We are…executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips,” Bill Kircos, an Intel spokesman said Tuesday, writing in a blog posted on Intel’s Web site.
This server product line expansion is optimized for…segments such as high-performance computing,” he wrote. Intel Vice President Kirk Skaugen will provide further details next week at ISC 2010 in Germany.
Intel recently canceled plans to spin a graphics-like processor technology, codenamed Larrabee. The chip was rumored to be a massively parallel processor with a reasonably lightweight x86_64-based instruction set. According to Kircos’ post, Intel remains committed to leaving graphics out [at least for now]
Kircos reiterated that Intel has no plans to bring out a discrete graphics chip like the Larrabee chip for gaming PCs. “We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market, at least in the short-term,” he wrote.
insideHPC will be ‘johnny-on-the-spot’ at ISC with any news related to this and all other Intel news. In the mean time, check out the source article at CNET here.
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