Intel shows Larrabee wafer

Intel showed a wafer with Larrabee chips during the IDF in Beijing. The wafer proves that the Larrabee is going to be a big chip. According to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, the processor should be on the market at the end of this year or early 2010.

Pat Gelsinger showed the wafer at his keynote address at the IDF in Beijing, but the footage was not included in Intel’s webcast. A representative of the French site Hardware.fr knew take a picture though. The site compares the size of the chip with that of Nvidia’s GT200 GPU. Based on an estimated die size, Hardware.fr thinks the Larrabee will be fired at 45nm and not yet at 32nm, like the Westmere CPUs, which will start mass production at the end of this year.

Gelsinger also announced that Intel now has working Larrabee samples in its research facility. The first beta of Intel’s ‘GT’ compiler should also be released at the end of this year. The GT language is optimized for writing parallel software and has to compete with Nvidia’s Cuda, among other things.