Although Intel had previously promised that Larrabee-based products would be launching in the first quarter of 2010, the company has chosen to make a rather late announcement that it wasn’t being exactly honest with that launch date. As reported by PC Magazine, company spokesman Nick Knupffer admits that “Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,” and states that “as a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product, but rather be used as a software development platform for internal and external use.”

While Larrabee’s innovative architecture promised a different way of looking at the process of rendering graphics – described by Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini back in 2007 as “a highly parallel, many core product comprised of an array of Intel architecture cores” promising” “teraflops of performance” – the truth of where the product was came out at IDF back in September, almost two years after Larrabee’s original announcement, when a demonstration by senior research scientist Bill Mark used a Larrabee prototype to run the real-time ray-traced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demonstration incredibly slowly. Interestingly, despite the embarrassing demonstration, Intel was still claiming at that time that the first Larrabee product would be “discrete performance graphics” boards – not an SDK.

While the news that 2010 will only be seeing an software development platform for Larrabee will be a blow for Intel, the company hasn’t completely given up on the idea of launching its own discrete graphics processor to compete with rival AMD and Nvidia – but it’s likely to be 2011 at the earliest.

The first is an article about the agreement ‘twix AMD and Intel over the latter’s allegedly anticompetitive behaviour, written back in November of last year.

As reported over on Wired, the two companies have agreed to settle their disputes – and it’s an agreement which sees AMD compensated for Intel’s past misdeeds.

Under the terms of the agreement, Intel is to pay rival AMD a whopping $1.25 billion (£754 million) in a five-year cross-licensing agreement which sees Intel compensating its rival for allegedly working to exclude it from the marketplace. In turn, AMD is to drop all pending lawsuits across the globe and withdraw all complaints it has made to regulatory bodies regarding Intel’s behaviour.

In a remarkably understated joint statement, the two companies claim that “while the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.”

The agreement finally settles the bad feeling between the two companies which has been ongoing since 2005, and will allow the two companies to concentrate on producing neat new products rather than attempting to litigate each other into submission.

The deal is certainly a welcome one for AMD, which has seen its share price increase by more than 30 percent on the news and should help to get the company get back on track in the processors marketplace.

If a leaked slide from a presentation authored by Sun Microsystems is to be believed, Intel is planning on launching a six-core processor aimed at the server market.

Although the Intel Dunnington has been rumoured for quite some time, the slide is the first evidence that Intel is planning to ditch its usual ‘cheat’ of putting multiple chips in a single package and is instead aiming for a true six-core single-chip processor.

The slide shows a six-core chip with each core paired up with a buddy to share a 3M chunk of level 2 cache for a total of 9M of L2 cache along with a whopping 16MB L3 cache shared between all three pairs. If the figures are right, that’s one heck of a lot of cache RAM and will certainly help to alleviate any nasty bottlenecks lurking around the yet-to-be-finalised Dunnington front-side bus.

The cores themselves are based on the Penryn architecture and will be built around a 45nm process to keep heat production to a minimum. The thermal profile is a fairly respectable 130W, which might seem a lot from a desktop perspective – after all, the ‘energy efficient’ models of Core 2 Quads come in at under 100W – but is pretty impressive for something that can replace six discreet processors.

The slide features an Intel Xeon logo, suggesting that the chip will be marketed under the same moniker as Intel’s existing server chip products. The launch date is given as some time in the second half of 2008, so we don’t have too long to wait to see if the rumours are true.