Larrabee GPU designer will return to work on graphics chip at Intel

Tom Forsyth returns to Intel and will work on the GPU that should be released in 2020 under the leadership of Raja Koduri. Forsyth is one of the architects of the Intel Larrabee project, with which Intel wanted to develop its own GPU more than ten years ago.

Forsyth says on Twitter that he will soon be joining Intel as a chip architect in Raja Koduri’s team. Under the leadership of the former AMD Radeon CEO, Intel is working on a high-end GPU, which should appear in 2020.

In recent years, Forsyth has worked at Oculus, Valve and 3Dlabs, among others. He also previously worked at Intel, as one of the principal architects of the Larrabee project. In 2007 it was presented as a gpgpu, which would be somewhere between a gpu and an x86 processor.

Two years after Larrabee’s announcement, it became clear that the design would never appear as a consumer GPU and the project was halted. The project was later continued, but no longer as a GPU. In 2011, Larrabee was relaunched as a coprocessor for supercomputers and the project eventually culminated in the Xeon Phi accelerators.

Forsyth has published a list of lectures and papers to his credit on his Github page.

Old slide from Intel about the Larrabee GPU