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Nvidia Claims Intel's Larrabee Is "a GPU From 2006"

Posted by Soulskill on from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.

Barence sends this excerpt from PC Pro: "Nvidia has delivered a scathing criticism of Intel's Larrabee, dismissing the multi-core CPU/GPU as wishful thinking — while admitting it needs to catch up with AMD's current Radeon graphics cards. 'Intel is not a stupid company,' conceded John Mottram, chief architect for the company's GT200 core. 'They've put a lot of people behind this, so clearly they believe it's viable. But the products on our roadmap are competitive to this thing as they've painted it. And the reality is going to fall short of the optimistic way they've painted it. As [blogger and CPU architect] Peter Glaskowsky said, the "large" Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI.' Speaking ahead of the opening of the annual NVISION expo on Monday, he also admitted Nvidia 'underestimated ATI with respect to their product.'"

9 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Doh of the Day by eddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...he also admitted Nvidia 'underestimated ATI with respect to their product.'

    Good, learn from that and don't make that same mistake again!

    Larrabee [...] will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI.'

    DOH!

    --
    Belief is the currency of delusion.
  2. Intel isn't aiming at gamers by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So why is NVIDIA on the defensive?

    Intel is aiming at number crunchers (note that their chip uses doubles, not floats). They don't want NVIDIA to steal that market with CUDA.

    When Intel says "graphics", they mean movie studios, etc.

    If Larrabee eventually turns into a competitor for NVIDIA, all well and good, but that's not their goal at the moment.

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    No sig today...
    1. Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers by Shinatosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ok. Nvidia and AMD/ATI probably will overperform the Intel GPU. However Intel has open specs of their GPU-s, so for NOT the gamers there will be a quite good performance GPU to be used under Linux for various purposes with high quality OSS drivers. Im looking forward to it.
      Shinatosh

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      :)
    2. Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers by Nymz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So why is NVIDIA on the defensive?

      I think the Nvidia people think pretty highly of themselves, rightfully so, and Intel has recently been making a number of bold claims, without backing them up. In a poker analogy, Nvidia is calling Intels bluff.

    3. Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, Intel has been very clear that it is targeting games, even saying "we will win" about them, see this interview with an Intel VP.

      NVidia is on the defensive for the simple reason that it needs to be. Not because Intel has a product that threatens NVidia, but because Intel is using classic vaporware strategies to undermine NVidia (and AMD/ATI). Intel is basically throwing around promises, and by virtue of its reputation a lot of people listen and believe those promises. With 'amazing Intel GPU technology just around the corner', some people might delay buying NVidia hardware. NVidia is trying to prevent that from happening.

    4. Re:Intel isn't aiming at gamers by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      zquote>Right now they're crapping their pants because they gambled everything on Vista which is failing spectacularly, whereas both ATi and Intel have got a 2 year head start on supporting Ubuntu out of the box.

      Traditionally (before the AMD buyout) ATI has had terrible support under Linux, nVidia has been delivering their binary drivers and they have in my experience been easy to install, stable and fully functional much longer than ATI. By the way, the latest 177.68 drivers should now have fixed the recent KDE4 performance issues. From what I've understood the fglrx (closed source) ATI driver has made considerable progress so maybe now they're equal, but closed vs closed source nVidia got nothing to be ashamed of. For exampel, ATI just this month added CrossFire support while SLI has been supported since 2005, that's more like three years behind than two years ahead.

      Of course, ATI is now opening up their specs but it's going slowly. For example, they have not yet recieved the 3D specs on the last generation R600 cards, much less the current generation. And after those specs are released some very non-trivial drivers must be written as well, meaning it could take another few years before we see fully functional open source drivers. Also this strategy is less than a year old, so if they're two years ahead they're moving fast. Nothing of this is something that should make nVidia executives the least bit queasy.

      They are crapping their pants because ATI has delivered two kick-ass parts in the 4850 and 4870, and there's very little reason to buy anything else these days. They are crapping their pants because Intel won't give them a Nehalem system bus license. They're crapping their pants because the 800lb gorilla that's Intel is entering a market everyone else has been leaving. They're crapping their pants because the US economy is shaky and people might not spend big $$$ on graphics cards. But over Linux support? Put it into perspective, and you'll see it's an extremely minor issue.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. Classic case of disruption by propanol · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ten years ago you would see Nvidia GPUs in everything from low- to high-end. Today, not so much - Intel dominates the low-end spectrum, with ATI hanging onto a somewhat insignificant market share. The Larrabee is Intel moving upmarket. Sure, it might not perform as well the latest Nvidia or ATI high-end GPU but it might be enough in terms of performance or have other benefits (better OSS support) to win some of Nvidia's current market share over. Considering it's supposedly the Pentium architecture recycled, it's also reasonable to assume the design will be relatively cost-effective and allow Intel to sell at very competitive prices while still maintaining healthy profit margins.

    It's a classic case of disruption. Intel enters and Nvidia is happy to leave because there's a segment above that's much more attractive to pursue. Continue along the same lines until there's nowhere for Nvidia to run, at which point the game ends - circle of disruption complete. See also Silicon Graphics, Nvidia's predecessor in many ways.

    1. Re:Classic case of disruption by eddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >ATI hanging onto a somewhat insignificant market share.

      C'mon, 17 million units shipped in a quarter and ~20% of the market is hardly 'a somewhat insignificant market share' in a market with four major players (Intel, nVidia, VIA).

      For comparison, take Matrox, they have insignificant market share with about 100K/q

      --
      Belief is the currency of delusion.
    2. Re:Classic case of disruption by cnettel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ten years ago, the Riva TNT was yet a few months away. S3 and ATI both had a great marketshare for low to mid-end, and 3dfx dominated the very top segment for gamers.