Intel Abandons Discrete Graphics

Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq: "Paul Otellini may think there's still life in Intel's Larrabee discrete graphics project, but the other guys at Intel don't appear to share his optimism. Intel's director of product and technology media relations, Bill Kircos, has just written a blog about Intel's graphics strategy, revealing that any plans for a discrete graphics card have been shelved for at least the foreseeable future. 'We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market,' stated Kircos, 'at least in the short-term.' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product, and said that the company's graphics division is now 'focused on processor graphics.'"

Comments

Groan

[Winckle]

I hope they at least manage to incorporate some of what they've learnt into their integrated chips.

Intel's integrated chips have been appallingly bad in the past, some incapable of decoding HD video with reasonable performance. Manufacturers using those intel integrated chips in their consumer level computers did a great deal of harm to the computer games industry.

Re:Mod parent "Likely."

[TheRaven64]

CPUs have been "fast enough" for years, but GPUs have not.

Really? I think you might want to take a look at what most people use their GPUs for. Unless you are a gamer, or want to watch 1080p H.264 on a slightly older CPU, a 4-5 generation old GPU is more than adequate. My current laptop is 3.5 years old, and I can't remember ever doing anything on it that the GPU couldn't handle. As long as you've got decent compositing speed and pixel shaders for a few GUI effects, pretty much any GPU from the last few years is fast enough for a typical user.

Re:Wait, what? This is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

A large, publicly announced project with a great deal of media hype that had the potential to shake up the industry was cancelled. So, yeah, stop the presses.

Not really

[Sycraft-fu]

Everyone gets up on Intel integrated GPUs because they are slow, but they are looking at it from a gamer perspective. Yes, they suck ass for games, however that is NOT what they are for. Their intended purpose is to be cheap solutions for basic video, including things like Aero. This they do quite well. A modern Intel GMA does a fine job of this. They are also extremely low power, especially new newest ones that you find right on the Core i5 line in laptops.

Now what AMD may do well in is a budget gaming market. Perhaps they will roll out solutions that cost less than a discreet graphics card, but perform better than a GMA for games. That may be a market they could do well in. However they aren't going to "kill" Intel by any stretch of the imagination. For low power, non-gaming stuff using minimal power is the key and the GMA chips are great at that. For the majority of gaming, a discreet solution isn't a problem ($100 gets you a very nice gaming card these days) and can be upgraded.

Re:Not really

[forkazoo]

Everyone gets up on Intel integrated GPUs because they are slow, but they are looking at it from a gamer perspective. Yes, they suck ass for games, however that is NOT what they are for. Their intended purpose is to be cheap solutions for basic video, including things like Aero. This they do quite well. A modern Intel GMA does a fine job of this. They are also extremely low power, especially new newest ones that you find right on the Core i5 line in laptops.

Funny, at this point, I thought the purpose of Intel graphics was to try and make sure that OpenCL never becomes a viable solution. Seriously, Intel does everything in their power to make their terrible graphics chips universal. They've done some pretty shady dealing over the years to try and make it happen. At this point, they have even put their GPU's right on the CPU's of their current generation laptop chips. Apple and nVidia had to come up with dual-GPU solutions that can't be as power efficient as an Intel-only solution because they have to leave the Intel GPU also running and burning power. Intel is trying to sue nVidia out of the integrated chipset market. Examples go on and on.

Why? It isn't like Intel makes all that much money on their GPU's. It's nothing to sneeze at. Intel makes more money in a year on GPU's than I'll probably make in a lifetime, but that's peanuts on the scale of Intel. It's also not enough cash to justify the effort. But, if you look at it as a strategic move to make sure that the average consumer will never have a system that can run GPGPU code out of the box, it starts to make a little more sense. Intel is trying to compete on sheer terribleness of their GPU's, because if the average consumer has an nVidia integrated GPU in their chipset, then developers will bother to learn how to take advantage of GPU computing, which will marginalize Intel's importance.

I know it sounds kind of like a crazy conspiracy theory, but after the last several years of Intel-watching, it really does seem like quietly strangling GPGPU is a serious strategic goal for Intel.

Re:Wait, what? This is news?

[TheRaven64]

From what I remember all the cards I was using at the time Intel was trying to sell the i740 (Permedia-2, TNT, etc) were on the AGP bus.

Check the dates. The i740 was one of the very first cards to use AGP. Not sure about the Permedia-2, but the TNT was introduced six months after the i740 and cost significantly more (about four times as much, as I recall). It performed a lot better, but that wasn't really surprising.

Re:So Intels next cpu will the same suck video bui

[Calinous]

"Graphics cards with performance comparable to the best integrated graphics aren't exactly expensive"
      You can't find expansion graphic cards with performance comparable to the current integrated graphics - the integrated graphics are slower than anything else (less available memory bandwidth, fewer compute clusters, ...).