Larrabee: A fiasco, or the future?

[Dimitriman]

My bet is Larrabee goes the way of the Duke Nuken...

[saaya]

My bet is Larrabee goes the way of the Duke Nuken...

no way, they will release it even if it sucks...

if they dont manage to graphics back on the cpu and to x86, then it means gpus will manage to get cpu functionality merged in... and that means, long term, bye bye x86 and bye bye intel... intel NEEDS larrabee...

[AMDDeathstar]

You would have sneak into Dreamworks and Pixar to find how well Larrabee is working.

Think more renderfarm then gaming.

From Motley Fool Sept. 12

And if today's action wasn't hot enough for you, keep an eye out for Intel's Larrabee GPU chips next year. Intel hasn't been a force in high-performance graphics hardware since the early 1990s, but that should change with Larrabee. DreamWorks Animation (Nasdaq: DWA) CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg waxes poetic over the product, saying that "Larrabee raises the bar of what we can do not just by 2X or 3X but by 20X."/

http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...-mountain.aspx

[Martijn]

I think Larrabee will be a lot like the Intel 740 graphics chip... Lots of talking during development, great performance at the time, but outdated by the time it'll be released...

[villa1n]

It's not a matter of If it will pan out, but rather when. How much money and how much ROI is what will dictate whether the product comes to fruition or not.. you cant tell me a company with 10 times the market cap of its top 2 competitors combined cant afford to hire engineers, developers to come up with something better than what is out there...its just a matter of resources.

[FischOderAal]

It's not a matter of If it will pan out, but rather when. How much money and how much ROI is what will dictate whether the product comes to fruition or not.. you cant tell me a company with 10 times the market cap of its top 2 competitors combined cant afford to hire engineers, developers to come up with something better than what is out there...its just a matter of resources.

Well, first I have to say that I have basically no knowledge about ICs whatsoever. But I don't think you can "easily" start from scratch and release a GPU that is as fast as the ones of your competitor, which have been in the business for several years. Somehow I doubt it's that easy, even with a f*ckload of resources.

[saaya]

Well, first I have to say that I have basically no knowledge about ICs whatsoever. But I don't think you can "easily" start from scratch and release a GPU that is as fast as the ones of your competitor, which have been in the business for several years. Somehow I doubt it's that easy, even with a f*ckload of resources.

why would an engineering team be able to build a sweet gpu at nvidia and ati but not intel? is there something special in the air or water in their labs there?

intel hired quite some nvidia engineers, if all they do is rebuild G200 on intels 45nm process they would probably be enough for a mainstream product already... the thing is, its not about building a fast gpu... intel could do that but it would accelerate them losing grip as x86 fades away... what they want is build a cpu that can act as a gpu... a software emulated gpu... and one that is at least as fast as a propper gpu... THAT is all still possible and a matter of resources... BUT, intel wants it to be financially feasible and possibly even wantsd to mkake money with it...

THAT might be something that is actually impossible... itll either be slower or cost more than a conventional gpu... you cant beat a fixed function processor in its own game with a general purpose processor at the same transistor budget...

its like expecting an SUV which can drive everywhere and is sortof a general purpose car, to beat an F1 car, which can only drive on very flat streets, but does so at insane speeds... now you either build an insane suv mutant at insane costs, that can drive as fast as a f1 car on a racetrack, but can ALSO drive everywhere else... or youll lose the race on an f1 track... obviously...

im confused how intel thought this was going to work... with their mfc advantage in their sleeve that might work out, but apparently they wanna use the cheap old 45nm fabs for lrb once cpus have moved to 32nm? 0_o

[Chumbucket843]

no way, they will release it even if it sucks...

if they dont manage to graphics back on the cpu and to x86, then it means gpus will manage to get cpu functionality merged in... and that means, long term, bye bye x86 and bye bye intel... intel NEEDS larrabee...

i have been thinking about larrabee lately. i dont think larrabee 1 is going to be impressive. software scheduling is a lot better at parallelism so i think their strategy is to get practice making gpu's for the future. you cant be very competitive with your first gpu even with amazingly smart people. even Huang recognized larrabee (in raytracing/gpgpu) as a threat and he generally looks down upon his rival companies. pixar has already signed up for some and f@h already has plans for larrabee. a general trend in graphics pipeline is less fixed function. well texture filtering maybe not. my philosophy on larrabee is "you gotta learn to crawl before you walk"

[Periander6]

Not sure why this thead was moved. Anyway....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10409715-64.html

"Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project," Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer said Friday. "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product," he said.

Fiasco.

[Donnie27]

Not sure why this thead was moved. Anyway....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10409715-64.html

Fiasco.

This isn't big enough to be a "Fiasco" LOL! I'd expect that from flippinwaffles or etc.. but what?

http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/...Q2-2008-2.png/

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Low-D...08-92971.shtml

With some guy talking about AMD and nVidia shipping millions of GPU's, I'm wonder WTF is he talking about, cell phones? Surely he's not talking about Discrete Video cards that LRB was meant for.

But no one is counting Intel out of course. The world's largest chipmaker is one of the most formidable competitors on the planet. Intel will, at the very least, incorporate Larrabee's "parallelism"--the ability to use its many processing cores to accelerate computing tasks--into future products. And Larrabee could emerge yet as a stand-alone whiz-bang product. "Intel invested a lot in Larrabee in dollars, time, reputation, dreams and ambitions, and exploration. None of that is lost. It doesn't vanish. Rather, that work provides the building blocks for the next phase," Peddie said.

Oh and Intel made about 53% of the 9 to 10 Billion dollar Graphic market.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10...ol;mlt_related

By not fighting and trying to be civil, they screwed up. You can't be civil to greedy @$$holes