Intel Kills Consumer Larrabee Plans

An anonymous reader tips news that Intel has canceled plans for a consumer version of their long-awaited and oft-delayed Larrabee chip, opting instead to use it as a development platform product. From VentureBeat: "'Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,' said Nick Knuppfler, a spokesman for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. 'Larrabee will not be a consumer product.' In other words, it’s not entirely dead. It’s mostly dead. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, it will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. But Knuppfler said that Intel will continue to work on stand-alone graphics chip designs. He said the company would have more to say about that in 2010."

Comments

Re:Oh rats

[chriso11]

NVidia hasn't let ATI do anything. Actually, NVidia is dealing with a series of problems - from serious packaging problems last year to TSMC yield issues now. ATI/AMD has been really effective lately; NVidia historically had a dominant position, but definitely not a monopoly, and I'll say that they have slipped a lot recently. Things change fast in the GPU race, so NVidia may recover quickly. But ATI/AMD have a solid amount of momentum, and the only real execution problem I've seen them make in the last few months in GPUs has been to rely on TSMC.

Take a look at the Dell Zino HD - it combines AMD's 'just enough CPU' with top end GPU to make a very compelling system. Intel has cut NVidia out of the chipsets, so they don't get the synergy that AMD has with ATI.

AMD is definitely better situated for the long haul than NVidia, and actually may be better off than Intel for complete systems.

I wonder if Bangalore has anything to do with it.

[bertok]

I think the announcement of the 48-core Intel 'Bangalore' chip just recently is not a coincidence.

When I first read about the Larrabee chip, I thought the decision to make it a cache coherent SMP chip to be simply insane - architectures like that are very difficult to scale, as the inter-core chatter scales roughly as the factorial of the number of cores. Remember how Larrabee was designed around a really wide 1024-bit ring bus? I bet that's required because otherwise the cores would spend all of their time trying to synchronize between each other.

So, Larrabee is effectively cancelled, but only a day or two before Intel announced an almost identical sounding part without cache-coherence! It sounds to me like they've given up on the 100% x86 compatibility, and realised that a chip with some extra instructions around explicit software controlled memory synchronization and message passing would scale way better. Without cache coherence, a "many core" chip is basically just an independent unit repeated over and over, so scalability should be almost infinite, and wouldn't require design changes for different sizes. That sounds like a much better match for a graphics processor.

While Intel kept their cards relatively close to their chest, from all of the presentations I've seen, no first-gen Larrabee chip could scale beyond 24 cores even with a 1024 bit bus, while the new Bangalore chip starts at 48 cores. There's no public info on how many lanes Bangalore has in its on-chip bus but based on the bandwidth of its 80 core experimental predecessor, I'm guessing it's either 32-bit or 64-bit (per core).

Re:In other words...

[ppanon]

Yeah, I've been wondering about that. For the last year I've heard people parrot how great Larabee was going to be and it reminded me a lot of the hype about how the Pentium IV (or even Itanium for that matter) was going to kick ass. I couldn't see Intel all of a sudden going from dead last in graphics performance to top of the heap. They would have needed some top graphics system designers on both the h/w and s/w sides and those people just haven't been at Intel. I can't help but wonder if Larabee FUD and the chipset disputes with NVidia might have been a one-two punch plan to knock down NVidia's market capitalization down a peg or two to make it cheaper buy out. Then Intel's in the driver's seat to get NVidia's expertise and patents for a song instead of paying top dollar for them. Intel could have been planning this from the moment AMD bought out ATI two years ago, or even earlier when the latter two were still in preliminary talks, I doubt there would be any email smoking guns over it though; Intel's where the paranoid survive after all. But if I'm right then I would expect Intel to make a play for NVidia in inside of two years. To wait much longer would give AMD/ATI too much of a headstart in a market increasingly dominated by laptops. Somehow, 18 months after Intel buys NVidia, Larabee II will show up with graphics performance slightly better than NVidia's last GPU (and those suckers doing Larabee development are going to find the pipeline/rendering model significantly changed to look a lot like NVidia's).