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TL;DR: Larrabee prototypes have surfaced before, but almost always as barebones hardware with no drivers to make them work properly. This find includes Intel's own software stack, now preserved on the Internet Archive. For the first time, owners of surviving cards can test what Intel's ill-fated GPU could actually do.

A Reddit user bought the contents of a storage unit at auction and ended up with what looked like an old Intel desktop. Inside was a development machine labeled "Intel Visual Adrenaline," containing an Intel DX58SO motherboard, a working Larrabee prototype and a separate diagnostic card. Larrabee was the x86-based graphics processor Intel hoped would take on Nvidia and ATI before the project collapsed.

When Intel shelved the GPU in late 2009, it said Larrabee would instead be used as a software development platform for high performance computing.…