It’s been over a decade since the project was canned, but noe a working Intel Larrabee graphics card has been found and installed into a modern PC running Windows 10 operating system. Thus far, this appears to be the first time a Larrabee GPU has booted a modern version of Windows successfully, as other attempts have failed.
A member of the LinusTechTips community over at Reddit managed to obtain a working Larrabee sample from ‘a friend who got it from their work.’ The board features a BIOS with build number 1.0.0.0102 dated 02/08/2010 (which is after Intel said it would not release Larrabee as a consumer graphics product). What is even more surprising is that the Larrabee graphics card was allegedly ‘pulled from an image processing machine that worked in connection to a CAT scan machine,’ which essentially meant that it was being used for image processing.
For obvious reasons, no Windows 10 drivers came with the card, but it could still work as a basic graphics adapter. GPU-Z recognized the graphics adapter as an Intel GPU and read its device ID (8086 2240 – 8086 2240) but could not recognize its model. The owner now plans to decompile the board’s BIOS, possibly to get something more out of the board.
Intel’s first discrete GPU, codenamed Larrabee, is perhaps the most mysterious piece of consumer PC hardware developed in the last couple of decades. Larrabee used massively parallel programmable Atom-like x86 cores to process graphics and high-performance computing workloads.
Intel only released cycle-accurate simulations of Larrabee performance once — back in 2008. But Intel never publicly released actual performance numbers for the part or allowed the press to run any benchmarks on the part before axing the GPU and refocusing its efforts to high-performance computing in 2009. Furthermore, it did everything to keep everything associated with Larrabee under wraps. Yet, some Larrabee boards are now leaking into the wild. A working Larrabee graphics card was also sold for $5,000 on eBay earlier this year.
So far, those with a Larrabee graphics card have not obtained a driver for the device, so they cannot run games or test its performance using synthetic benchmarks. But perhaps, at some point, someone will get lucky, and we will find out how Intel’s x86 hybrid CPU-GPU stacked up against graphics cards of the late 2000s. Of course, if you’re craving using an Intel-branded GPU, you could always turn to the company’s new cards — it just re-entered the GPU market with its Arc graphics cards.