Larrabee 2: secrets revealed during pub crawl !

Sunshine finally warmed the English countryside today. As a river meandered through the sleepy town of Newbury, one of the KitGuru crew was relaxing outside the Lock, Stock and Barrels pub. As he supped his well earned lager, he overheard something very interesting indeed.

Sitting not too far away, a pair of gentlemen were similarly smitten with the sunshine, but their conversation had nothing to do with nature or the changing seasons.

KitGuru’s ears first pricked up when he heard ‘Intel’ in the conversation. Later, he heard ‘Mentor'. At another stage, ‘Larrabee‘. The conversation all seemed very positive (was there talk of big bonuses for smashing previous targets?) and seemed to centre on a big new deal that has been struck, but what for?

Pulling his imported iPad out of its protective sleeve, he picked up a local wi-fi connection and began searching.

The first pages he pulled up caused befuddling, with Mentor’s site offering “The innovative Calibre InRoute Open Router architecture which allows the Olympus-SoC system to natively invoke Calibre SVRF-based DRC and DFM analysis in the inner loop of the router”.

Things got easier, and a little more obvious, when he hit “Mentor Graphics developed Calibre InRoute to support manufacturing closure for advanced node designs” at www.mentor.com

Bottom line?   Intel seems to have completed its internal analysis of the failings of Larrabee v1, created a completely revised strategy and product definition for Larrabee v2 and, most importantly, begun shopping for the tools necessary to design and deliver a world class, discrete graphics solution.

KitGuru says: Amazing what you can learn in a pub. Our money is on Intel doing whatever it takes to pwn (sic) the next generation consoles, which would allow it to completely revolutionise the way in which games are written, to make them perfect for massive arrays of really simple x86 units.

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