facebook rss twitter

Jon Peddie asks: why not Larrabee?

by Scott Bicheno on 5 August 2008, 11:22

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaoop

Add to My Vault: x

The gathering storm

Intel released a few more teasers about “Larrabee”, which is the codename for its discrete graphics project, yesterday. Larrabee is expected to make an appearance by 2010 so graphics market expert Jon Peddie took an early look at its potential in his blog.

In its press release yesterday Intel confirmed it will be describing the features and capabilities of Larrabee at SIGGRAPH 2008 on 12th August. Peddie (pictured) starts by stressing that it’s a mistake to call Larrabee a GPU, although Intel claims “it can do it all”. He, quite rightly, is reserving judgement until he can see for himself.

Peddie then asks “What is Larrabee’s market potential?” He points out that there has been heavy consolidation in the discrete graphics market over the past ten years such that ATI and NVIDIA now own 98 percent of it.

Cracking an established duopoly is no easy task, but Peddie argues that with its extensive resources and deep pockets, if anyone can Intel can. Whether or not it’s worth trying, however, is another matter.

Peddie calculates that the discrete graphics market is around 20 million units per quarter, so if it achieves parity with the incumbents it will shift up to 7 million units per quarter. Assuming growth in the sector and accounting for “hybrid” graphics and “GPU compute” opportunities, Peddie estimates a market potential of 46 million units in 2010.

From that he uses an average selling price of $100 for each chip to arrive at a total available market (TAM) of $4.6 billion in 2010. Of course this is a ballpark figure, but it provides an interesting glimpse of the size of the market, especially when you consider that NVIDIA’s market cap is 6 billion and AMD’s is only 2.6 billion.

Peddie finishes where he started: on the matter of calling Larrabee a GPU (graphics processing unit). He says that, since it’s a “gang of X86 cores that can do graphics processing” it should instead be called a GCPU (graphics capable processing unit). He doesn’t hold out much hope that the term will catch on, however.

Link: JPR blog



HEXUS Forums :: 0 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
Log in to be the first to comment!