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:Groan

[Pojut]

For anyone stuck with an Intel GMA chipset: GMA Booster may help solve some of your problems. Just make sure you have a decent cooling solution, as it can ramp up the heat output of your system considerably. Still, if you're stuck with GMA, it can make the difference between a game being unplayable and being smooth.

missed milestones

[LinuxIsGarbage]

' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product,

Like proof that they were even capable of making an integrated graphics product that wasn't a pile of garbage?

GMA910: Couldn't run WDDM, thus couldn't run Aero, central to the "Vista capable" Lawsuits

GMA500: decent hardware, crappy drivers under Windows, virtually non-existant Linux drivers, worse performance than GMA950 in Netbooks.

Pressure to lockout competing video chipsets. We're lucky ION saw the light of day. http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,680035/Nvidia-versus-Intel-Nvidia-files-lawsuit-against-Intel/News/

Mod parent "Likely."

[Spazntwich]

Short of buying out Nvidia I don't see Intel having a consumer's chance in America of competing with AMD in the value sector for the next few generations of chips.

CPUs have been "fast enough" for years, but GPUs have not. AMD is going to laugh all the way to the bank being able to offer a $50 package that can run The Sims.

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:Mod parent "Likely."

[Korin43]

As long as you've got decent compositing speed and pixel shaders for a few GUI effects, pretty much any ATI or nVidia GPU from the last few years is fast enough for a typical user.

Fixed that for you. Intel cards are fine for "normal" computer usage, but they still suck pretty bad at most games.

Both good and bad

[TheRealQuestor]

This is bad news for one reason. Competition. There are only 2 major players in discreet graphics right now and that is horrible for the consumer. Now the good. Intel SUCKS at making gpus. I mean seriously. So either way Intel has no hope of making a 120 core GPU based off of x86 being cheap or fast enough to compete. Go big or stay at home. Intel stay at home.

Re:Both good and bad

[FreonTrip]

VIA stopped designing motherboards for AMD and Intel CPUs about two years ago. Consequently, you can't find its GPUs in many places aside from embedded systems or ultra low-budget netbooks and the like. Weirdly they still sell a miniscule number of discrete cards, primarily overseas, but without divine intervention they'll never become a serious player again.

Matrox serves niche markets, mostly in the way of professional workstations, medical imaging equipment, and the odd sale of their TripleHead system to the ever-eroding hardcore PC gamer market.

In case anyone wonders what happened to the others: Oak Technologies' graphics division was acquired by ATI many moons ago; Rendition was eaten by Micron in 1998 and their name is now used to sell budget RAM; SiS bought Trident's graphics division, spun off their graphical company as XGI Technologies, had a series of disastrous product releases, and had their foundries bought by ATI, who let them continue to sell their unremarkable products to eager low-bidders; and 3dfx was mismanaged into oblivion a decade ago.

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.

A discrete component

[tepples]

More directly, what the hell is "discrete graphics"?

It refers to a graphics processor as a separate (discrete) component of a computer system. A chip that does nothing but graphics can be more powerful than integrated graphics because the GPU circuitry doesn't have to share a die with the rest of the northbridge.

Re:I wonder

[TheRaven64]

It's not a new term, and it's not unique to GPUs. The distinction between integrated and discrete coprocessors has been around for at least 25 years. If you read something like Byte from the early '90s, you will find discussions about the relative merits of integrated and discrete FPUs. You'll find a similar discussion on integrated and discrete MMUs and various other components if you look a few years earlier.

Larrabee was a hedge anyway

[Funk_dat69]

I kind of think Larrabee was a hedge.

If you think about it, around the time it was announced (very early on in development, which is not normal), you had a bunch of potentially scary things going on in the market.
Cell came out with a potentially disruptive design, Nvidia was gaining ground in the HPC market, OpenCL was being brought forth by Apple to request a standard in hybrid computing.

All of sudden it looked like maybe Intel was a little too far behind.

Solution: Announce a new design of their own to crush the competition! In Intel-land, sometimes the announcement is as big as the GA. Heck, the announcement of Itanium was enough to kill off a few architectures. They would announce Larrabee as a discrete graphics chip to get gamers to subsidize development and....profit!

Lucky for them, Cell never found a big enough market and Nvidia had a few missteps of their own. Also, Nehalem turned out to be successful. Add all that up, and it becomes kind of clear that Larrebee was no longer needed, negating the fact that it was a huge failure, performance-wise.

Intel is the only company that can afford such huge hedge bets. Looks like maybe another one is coming to attack the ARM threat. We'll see.

Limited to 950

[manekineko2]

Note for anyone else whose curiosity was piqued, this only works with 32bit systems with 950 chipset based systems, and does not work with GMA X3100, GMA X4500, GMA 500, or GMA 900.