Perhaps the one working prototype of Intel’s deserted Larabee GPU simply offered for greater than scalped, pandemic-era AMD or Nvidia graphics card. This pretty blue element, one of many solely remaining reminders of Intel’s failed try at a discrete GPU, was bought on eBay France for €4,650, or $5,234.

The graphics card is alleged to be useful and a screenshot within the itemizing reveals a BIOS startup web page. However, this can be a prototype engineering pattern with out drivers, so not precisely the type of factor you’d use to play Crysis. It could be higher fitted to a museum as an endangered species, one which was set to compete towards AMD and Nvidia till Intel canceled the venture in 2010, citing delays that made the GPU “uncompetitive.”

While $5,000 is nothing to sneeze at, one may need anticipated such a uncommon element to command an excellent larger worth. After all, the vendor may be proper when stressing that “this could be your only chance to get this piece of history.” We don’t understand how the vendor, who has a 100% satisfaction ranking (for no matter that’s value) obtained this GPU, however their previous listings consist of varied uncommon devices.

The vendor additionally claims that that is the “one and only working Larrabee prototype in the world,” they usually seem to have uploaded a YouTube video displaying the GPU put in in a desktop and operating on Windows. As for the declare of this being the “only” one round, it’s value noting that at the least one other YouTuber claims to have a operating prototype.

Larrabee was introduced in 2018 as Intel’s reentrance into the discrete desktop GPU, or extra precisely, GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing models) area. Rather than create a graphics card meant for gaming, Intel’s model, based mostly on x86, was a hybrid between a CPU and a GPU. As Tom’s Hardware notes, the aim was for the silicon to transcend gaming and help the CPU in a wider vary of workloads, with results different GPUs didn’t assist, like real-time ray-tracing and irregular shadow mapping.

Larabee was based mostly on Pentium designs and contained 32 four-way multithreaded cores, every with a 512-bit vector processing unit, and a 1,024-bit (512-bit bidirectional) reminiscence bus. Since this card wasn’t constructed for gaming, it ran far behind comparable AMD and Nvidia GPUs, attaining about one-fourth of the gaming efficiency. But because it was a hybrid chip, Larabee might supposedly run its personal working system.

The discrete hybrid card finally failed as a consequence of numerous bugs and delays, however the underlying know-how lived on. Intel’s supercomputing division would finally undertake the tech and launch Xeon Phi, a collection of manycore processors, together with Knights Corner, which might be utilized in China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the quickest of its form from 2013 to 2015. If you need to study extra about that chip, this Linus Tech Tips video is value a watch.

Tom Forsyth, one in all Larrabee’s chief designers, wrote in a blog post that he’s usually requested concerning the venture and his response may shock some: “Every month or so, someone will ask me what happened to Larrabee and why it failed so badly. And I then try to explain to them that not only didn’t it fail, it was a pretty huge success.”

He admitted that the cardboard struggled when it got here to gaming, however that was a results of politics and time, not essentially a fault of Larrabee, “Larrabee did run graphics, and it ran it surprisingly well. Larrabee emulated a fully DirectX11 and OpenGL4.x compliant graphics card – by which I mean it was a PCIe card, you plugged it into your machine, you plugged the monitor into the back, you installed the standard Windows driver, and… it was a graphics card. There were no other graphics cards in the system. It had the full DX11 feature set, and there were over 300 titles running perfectly.”

Intel is now gearing as much as reenter the discrete GPU area with Arc Alchemist. The firm introduced final month that the long-awaited high-end discrete graphics has began delivery to laptop computer and desktop distributors. We haven’t but seen comparisons between Arc and AMD/Nvidia chips, however Intel GPU boss Raja Koduri tweeted final week that his mission is to get “millions of Arc GPUs into the hands of PC gamers every year.”