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

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.

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.

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.