Chicago (IL) – Intel may soon be announcing a close relationship with Nvidia, which apparently will be contributing to the company’s Larrabee project, TG Daily has learned. Larrabee is expected to roll out in 2009 and debut as a floating point accelerator product with a performance of more than 1 TFlops as well as a high-end graphics card with dual-graphics capabilities.

Rumors about Intel’s Larrabee processor have been floating around for more than a year. Especially since the product’s official announcement at this year’s spring IDF and an accelerating interest in floating point accelerators, the topic itself and surrounding rumors are gaining traction every day.

Industry sources told TG Daily that Intel is preparing a “big” announcement involving technologies that will be key to develop Larrabee. And at least some of those technologies may actually be coming from Nvidia, we hear: Our sources described Larrabee as a “joint effort” between the two companies, which may expand over time. A scenario in which Intel may work with Nvidia to develop Intel-tailored discrete graphics solutions is speculation but is considered to be a likely relationship between the two companies down the road. Clearly, Intel and Nvidia are thinking well beyond their cross-licensing agreements that are in place today.

It is unclear when the collaboration will be announced; however, details could surface as early as June 26, when the International Supercomputing Conference 2007 will open its doors in Dresden, Germany.

Asked about a possible announcement with Intel, Nvidia spokesperson Ken Brown provided us with a brief statement: “We enjoy a good working relationship with Intel and have agreements and ongoing engineering activities as a result. This said, we cannot comment further about items that are covered by confidentiality agreements between Intel and Nvidia.”  

Intel replied to our inquiry by saying that the company does "not comment on rumors and speculation."



The AMD-ATI and Intel-Nvidia thingy

In the light of the AMD-ATI merger, it is only to be expected that the relationship between Intel and Nvidia is examined on an ongoing basis. So, what does a closer relationship between Intel and Nvidia mean?

The combination with ATI enabled AMD to grow into a different class of company. It evolved from being CPU-focused into a platform company that not only can match some key technologies of Intel, but at least for now has an edge in areas such as visualization capabilities. At a recent press briefing, the company showed off some of its ideas and it was clear to us that especially the area of general purpose GPUs will pave the way to a whole new world of enterprise and desktop computing.

Nvidia is taking a similar approach with its CUDA software interface, which allows developers to take advantage of the (general purpose) floating point horsepower of Geforce 8 graphics processors - more than 500 GFlops per chip. Intel’s Larrabee processor is also aimed at applications that benefit from floating point acceleration – such as physics, enhanced AI and ray tracing.

While it has been speculated that Intel may be creating Larrabee with an IA CPU architecture, we were told there may be more GPU elements in this processor than we previously had thought. A Larrabee card with a (general purpose) graphics processing unit will support CPUs in applications that at least partially benefit from massively parallel processing (as opposed to the traditional sequential processing); in gaming, the Larrabee processor can be used for physics processing, for example.

An imminent collaboration announcement between Intel and Nvidia, which reminds us of a recent Digitimes story that claimed Nvidia was trading technologies with Intel, of course, raises the question how close the relationship between Intel and Nvidia might be. It also raises the question, once again, if Intel may actually be interested in buying Nvidia – which could make a whole lot of sense for Intel, but appears to be rather unlikely at this time. Nvidia could cost Intel more than $15 billion, given the firm’s current market cap of $12.6 billion, and the talk in Silicon Valley indicates that Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang isn’t really interested in selling the company.  

But a deal with Intel, involving the licensing of technologies or even supply of GPUs could have a huge impact on Nvidia’s bottom line and catapult the company into a new phase of growth. However, a closer collaboration could be important for Intel as well: AMD’s acquisition of ATI was not a measure to raise the stakes in the graphics market or to battle Nvidia; it was a move to compete in the future CPU market – with Intel. Having Nvidia on board provides Intel with a graphics advantage, at least from today’s point of view, and could allow the company to more easily access advanced graphics technology down the road.
 

Read on the next page: What we know about Larrabee - board layout