and my point is that the die area is the biggest problem with these chips because the wafers aren't that big and if a couple of transistors fail in the manufacturing process the whole thing is a bust; intel's problem isn't as big as nvidia's because that itanium cost ~$3.5k when first introduced so its sure to make a ton of profit.
I understand that you like monolithic graphic cores but the problem is that there is such a thing as "too big" in the manufacturing world. Bigger dies mean higher chance that one of them goes bad in the manufacturing and also a lot more wasted die space, wafers being round compared to chips being rectangular(why they haven't yet made some advances in making square wafers is beyond be, i mean, they use circles since like forever)
getting back on topic, Nemesis, if the TFlop estimation is correct for larabee i'll be extremely disappointed in it, i mean, thats two years from now, the Radeon 4670 for $80 beats every card from 2 years ago so i won't be surprised if we'll see in two years 4870 like performance(1TFlop) for under $100. Also, TFlop performance takes into consideration the best case scenario where software is specifically written for the card to take full advantage of it, that's why the 4870 doesn't beat the GTX280 even though it has ~0.3 more TFLops. Sure intel has the money to make that happen but that would be most likely for the expensive programs(photoshop, maya, autocad, etc) and not for games specifically because lets face it, intel sucks at gamin, and also there are far to many game making companies out there. The real problem intel will face is the huge library of games they'll have to optimize their drivers for, i feel sorry for their larrabe driver team(not the IGP driver team )