Samples – News Posts

If you’ve been awaiting the debut of Intel’s Larrabee multi-core graphics processor with bated breath, there’s been a bit of a hiccup: the system has been downgraded to the status of ‘software development platform’, at least for now.

Although Intel had previously promised that Larrabee-based products would be launching in the first quarter of 2010, the company has chosen to make a rather late announcement that it wasn’t being exactly honest with that launch date. As reported by PC Magazine, company spokesman Nick Knupffer admits that “Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,” and states that “as a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product, but rather be used as a software development platform for internal and external use.”

While Larrabee’s innovative architecture promised a different way of looking at the process of rendering graphics – described by Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini back in 2007 as “a highly parallel, many core product comprised of an array of Intel architecture cores” promising” “teraflops of performance” – the truth of where the product was came out at IDF back in September, almost two years after Larrabee’s original announcement, when a demonstration by senior research scientist Bill Mark used a Larrabee prototype to run the real-time ray-traced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demonstration incredibly slowly. Interestingly, despite the embarrassing demonstration, Intel was still claiming at that time that the first Larrabee product would be “discrete performance graphics” boards – not an SDK.

While the news that 2010 will only be seeing an software development platform for Larrabee will be a blow for Intel, the company hasn’t completely given up on the idea of launching its own discrete graphics processor to compete with rival AMD and Nvidia – but it’s likely to be 2011 at the earliest.

US retailer Newegg was left with yolk on its face following reports that it has sent fake Core i7 CPUs to customers – with up to three hundred false retail boxes having been identified so far.

As first reported over on HardOCP, some of Newegg’s customers reported receipt of apparently fake versions of Intel i7-920 CPU retail boxes – containing mock CPU, heatsink, and blank documentation.

With a YouTube unboxing video showing the external realism, it’s not hard to see how the issue wasn’t spotted until customers started to unbox the fakes: from the outside, the only apparent issue is a few grammatical and spelling errors on the English blurb. Once the package is unboxed, however, the problem becomes apparent: a solid, fake heatsink; a blank instruction manual; and a non-functional, slightly curved processor.

While many are seeing this as a case of fake processors being snuck into Newegg’s supply chain, the official line from the company – as reported over on TechPowerup is that the fake retail boxes aren’t intended to be malicious. Instead, the retailer has claimed on its Twitter page that the fakes are “demo boxes” which were mistakenly shipped to customers by “one of our long-term partners.”

Whether the claim of demo boxes is anything other than face-saving by the retailer, the fact that the company has “already begun proactively reaching out to the affected customers” and ensuring that their purchases are replaced with fully functional units will come as a reassurance to Newegg’s customers.

Still, it does raise the question of how exactly the mix-up occurred: if the items are, as the company claims, demo boxes – why the effort to make them look as realistic as they do, complete with fake heatsink and blank manual? If the boxes are, as many instead believe, counterfeits – how did they enter Newegg’s supply chain and make it as far as being shipped to customers? So far, the company is remaining silent as to the long-term effects this issue could have on customer confidence.