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My first thought too. They have sunk an awful lot of money into GPUs without ever delivering a really competitive offering. And then there was Larrabee...

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I attended a Larrabee session at Games Developer Conference Europe 2009, only to see the project get dumped an year later.

Now they have Xeon Phi, but wonder if it ever matter for games.

Xeon Phi is not for games. It could theoretically be used for accelerated software rendering but it does not have any video hardware (such as a DVI output connector).

I think this comparison says everything that needs to be said about Xeon Phi (for now):

http://clbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?config_0=15887974&config_...

Better luck next generation...

Larrabee was also not directly meant for games. Intel was pushing for vector processing on the CPU as replacement for the GPGPUs.

You don't need video hardware directly.

Using Larrabee or now Xeon Phi would not be much different from doing 3D math with vector instructions or co-processors, like on the old days, before accelerated graphic cards became the norm in the PC world.

The main issue is that so far Intel was not been able to produce anything that beats AMD or NVidias offerings in GPGPU market.

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