Posted on Saturday, April 19 2008 @ 0:26 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
FUD Zilla
reports Intel is negotiating with several possible add-in-board partners for its Larrabee GPU.
It looks that Intel won’t be selling its graphics cards directly to the distributors and stores and it will rather sell chips to its partners and enjoy the profits from the silicon. This is a business model that Nvidia and ATI are exploiting for years and for them it turned to be the most enjoyable one. We can confirm that Intel probed some of the partners and talked about the partnership with Larrabee discrete cards.
Years ago, ATI was selling its cards directly but it withdrew from that business model as eventually ATI was competing with its partners and has created a rather unhealthy environment.
Intel will find a lucky few who will try to push Larrabee and we hear that 2009 is the year for retail products, probably later rather than earlier. You can bet to see some Taiwanese names as they are the most un-loyal ones.
