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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."
A nicer way of saying:
Uhm, guys, remember how we were supposed to ship a year ago and said recently we will ship a year from now? Well, add 5 to that now...but we will provide and totally kick ass, promise.
One that hath name thou can not otter
In case you've forgotten what a Larrabee was (like I had), it was Intel's planned graphics / vector processing chip, competing with nVidia and AMD / ATI graphics systems. Here's the Wikipedia article.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hmm... I think Intel's plan is for Larrabee GPU's to launch at the same time as Duke Nukem Forever! :)
I would say ATI AMD are about to become the leader. Intel is making it more difficult to ship mobile systems without the craptastic intel graphics cards. Larrabee was supposed to be a decent performance GPU, that would almost be like a co-processor.
AMD has slightly slower CPU's, but their intgerated graphics blow the snot out of the Intel ones, and are getting even better.. What good is a super fast CPU, if you can't play any games, or even do basic stuff without using the power hungry CPU?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I spent most of internship in intel arguing with people hyping larabee as the 2nd coming of jesus that it would never happen... And now i can finally say HAH!
Vaporware is not faster than existing products.
Jibe!
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.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
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).