Word is going around that Intel will first release its Larrabee GPU for the lucrative high-margin workstation market. NVIDIA holds 85 percent of this market and FUD Zilla claims Intel wants to gain a foothold in this segment sometime in the second half of 2009. The desktop version of Larrabee, which may appeal to gamers, is scheduled for 2010.
Workstation drivers are a complex thing but based on OpenGL as this is what most of the workstation application use but you still need to optimise this driver to perfection to get the desired results from it and to hope to performance leadership in this market.
Workstation market is very attractive as the margins on these products are as high as sixty percent, while when you sell a high-end graphics card you can only hope to get a fifteen percent margin. This gives you a clear idea why companies want to be the part of this lucrative market.
