Intel shows Larrabee wafer at IDF

[LowRun]

You guys are gonna cry 'cos it's in French :D

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/757-4/idf-printemps-2009-pekin.html

[largon]

Those are bloody huuge dies.

[Buckeye]

That guy looks like he has been up for a whole week, maybe just a bit tired in that photo :)

[LowRun]

Those are bloody huuge dies.

Yeah, that's the first comment they make too :D

I'm working on a little translation for you guys.

[largon]

Buckeye,
Pat (Gelsinger) is the weariest chap over at Intel. He kept bitching at AMD even back then when all Intel had was P4.

[LowRun]

There it is, the best i could do.

During his keynote, Pat Gelsinger briefly took out a Larrabee wafer, mentioning that it was functional at Intel labs. A few seconds later, the wafer was gone and had in fact been hidden in the webcast published on Intel site. We could take a pic but unfortunately from a long distance.

Nevertheless you can see on the pic that the die is huge, we can estimate it being approximately 600mm² based on that 300mm wafer, something similar to Nvidia's 65nm GT200 and six times bigger than a dualcore Penryn.

That leaves the question about the process. A die that big leads us to think Intel won't use it's new 32nm process but rather will use 45nm, Gelsinger also said Intel would launch it's first Larrabee based graphics card end of 2009 or early 2010. On the other hand, 32 nm could be required for Intel to make a louder bang. 48 cores on 45nm or 64 cores on 32nm? Bets are open on Larrabee's first generation.