Intel's Larrabee many-core CPU-GPU mashup is so far behind schedule it will not be released as a standalone product.

An Intel spokesman told The Reg on Friday afternoon that both hardware and software work on the much-anticipated part is tardy, and this means the chip won't be released into the wild as anything other than a software development platform.

It will be offered to external devs as well as internal Intel engineers. This might include, for example, graphics-card developers and HPC shops. Exactly when, however, the Intel spokesman didn't say. "2010" was as definite as he wanted to be.

But it would seem that some sort of similar product will arrive to market at much later date. The company told us it remained "committed to delivering world-class many-core graphics products," and it said it intends to reveal other plans for discrete graphics products sometime next year.

It also seems that the company will offer a Larrabee-like development platform for high-throughput applications. It demonstrated this sort of thing at the SC09 HPC conference last month.

The company spokesman would not commit, however, to confirming if such architectural details as Larrabee's ring bus will make it into future products based on the ongoing research. ®