Anandtech: Intel Kills Larrabee GPU, Will Not Bring a Discrete Graphics Product to Market

Dated: May 25, 2010
Bill Kircos, Intel’s Director of Product & Technology PR, just posted a blog on Intel’s site entitled “An Update on our Graphics-Related Programs”. In the blog Bill addresses future plans for what he calls Intel’s three visual computing efforts:

There’s a ton of information in the vague but deliberately worded blog post, including a clear stance on Larrabee as a discrete GPU: We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market, at least in the short-term. Kircos goes on to say that Intel will increase

[darkequitus]

Thats it then. From delay to complete bow out.

[DeadlyFire]

This is old news. They said in 2009 they would not be releasing Larrabee in 2010. Its still possible with a 2nd generation though. Larrabee is only first generation of Intel's GPU dealings. They can use what they learn and apply it to CPU/GPU hybrids that come along as well as continue work on Larrabee 2 or whatever the next generation is called. Intel and AMD both come up with new names every year it seems for their new line ups.

[Pandamobile]

Well...

Shit...

[led1090]

fudge that give us project offset

[Pandamobile]

Yeah that's all I want :(

[ultramoot]

I'm really starting to NOT like Intel right now. What the fudge is up with them holding off Project Offset?(they were working on it, right?)

[DeadlyFire]

They scraped and rebuilt the game engine not that long ago along 2009 I think Intel did something. Its still coming as far as I know, but Intel is very quiet. Intel and Havok are at E3 2010 we will have to wait and see. It appears that GDC is their most favored event for showing game bits though. I hope something new is shown.

[Marty8370]

Larrabee takes most it's design idea's from Cell and doesn't improve on them. I mean they are even going down the 'Hybrid' route, just like Cell.

[BlackKnight]

Will you fanboys shut up for once? Larrabee is based on Pentium MMX architecture, that's from the 90's dude.

And think about, a CPU company that tries to make a GPU ends up with a GPU with CPU features...no shit. Why wouldn't they use their CPU expertise in making a GPU? I assure you it has nothing to do with Intel copying the cell, or more accurately said, IBM.

[Ju]

It is exactly based on the ideas of the CELL.

It takes it a step further. Many cores, high vector power (SSE derivative), added discrete ISA (which happens to be ia32) and HW extension to improve ROPs (HW texture unit), hyperthreaded/cross over with HW cache management instead of local storage with ring bus.

These are exactly the ideas the CELL was born from. And it ignored some aspects the CELL did from the beginning: the ring bus was designed to solve cache coherency problems with many cores and guarantee high bandwidth. The SPUs are a from scratch designed ISA because nothing else could be implemented in a small footprint, as fast as these CPUs and be reasonably fast.

The lack of branching being one of the compromises/shortcomings. Ring bus requires SW based memory management. And the lack of a HW ROP unit means, complex texture operations are limited to memory bandwidth and hence not feasible on the CELL.

intel tried to address all those things. And yet, their plans turned out to be too ambitious. Just shows how far ahead the CELL designers were back then; now that intel is giving up.

But, note, how intel refers to Larrabee to be a research project for HPC. There is a demand for many core vector processors. That is where Larrabee will end up, eventually.

Larrabee might have made the most sense in a (next generation) gaming console. It's save to say, now, that whatever that next generation will be, it ain't intel (Larrabee) based...

[E46M3]

Intel is giving up cause it cant keep up with the likes of AMD and Nvidia.

Something the Cell couldnt do either. Which is why Sony abandoned their original design of 2 cells and actually went with a GPU from Nvidia.

Had Sony stuck to their original design of 2 cells the PS3 would have been a joke compared to the 360.

While sony likes to hype the cell much. In reality Cells graphics capabilities are a joke compared to a real Gpu.

[Trroy]

The Cell is too functional to compete with GPUs -- it can do too much, which requires too much logic, and yields sheer numbers of pipes for flexibility. Lack of flexibility, and the resulting greater numbers of simplified work pipelines, is what gives modern GPUs their performance prowess.

On the other hand, the Cell, as a HPC CPU design, is downright unbeatable by any other design in existance, including the Larrabee and i7.

The i7 is a stellar general purpose processor, which is geared toward making slow apps faster, like your typical office program, or server service. The Cell is incredible for tasks which lend themselves well to parallel, performance computing, that require custom programming but that can't be bound by the limitations of a specialized processor like a GPU. A Cell which shared the die size of an i7 would absolutely demolish the i7 in HPC tasks -- one of which is simulation/gaming. Because of the custom-program nature of HPC tasks, Cell apps can always be written faster than Larrabee apps could be, simply because the shared cache actually gets in the way of performance computing -- it enforces ease of development, at the expense of performance.

The Larrabee tried to be everything all at once, and failed.

[BlackKnight]

JU, my point is it's not based on cell. As you put it, it's based on some of the same ideas that the cell was, which is completely different.

Larrabee is just not going to be released to the consumer market since as far as gaming goes, it didn't reach the milestones they set for performance in a timely matter. It's still going to be offered for business solutions and research.

[BlackKnight]

Trroy, when you say the Cell would beat a Core i7 at simulation/gaming, that's quite a generalization. Gaming contains a vast array of different calculations. A more accurate statement would be that the Cell would be faster in certain types of calculations done in gaming while lose to others.

[sikbeta]

Isn't Larrabee a GPGPU? sorry if I'm wrong, I don't know crap about HW...

[Ju]

It is basically a CPU which does graphics. But not a massive "stream processor" design like current gen GPUs, but a "many cores" cpu which does what 512 stream processors do with 32 more general purpose cores. stream processors are just that: they operate best on a large data set, but would not necessarily outperform general purpose cores in say branching etc. A vector processor can be seen as some sort of a hybrid. It is very fast on large data sets but can do some sort of general purpose tasks. Larrabee used a standard (smaller) ia32 architecture with extended SSE vector cores.

The expectation was, the higher performance in general purpose computing could offset the advantage stream processors have on raw data.

And example from a couple of years ago showed the CELL outperforming the then current GPUs in things like raytracing, etc. Which requires a high vector performance but also more complexer operations than those gpGPUs could perform at the time.

Lately, stream processors got more general purpose ops as well. Means, those benefits of more discrete vector cores are getting smaller and smaller. I think there is still an advantage from a programming perspective to have a more complex ISA - but tools and modern "shader" languages hide this pretty well. In the scientific community, there is still a high demand for complex vector cpus.

Larrabee was an "experiment" from intel, to build on what the CELL showed it could do with vector data to avoid to go massive parallel, what NVidia and AMD/ATI is doing.

Those new gpGPUs have 500 or so cores. intel simply does not have the expertise to go down the route. Those cores are not just simplified cpus, they were specifically designed with a massive parallel concept. Not what intel (or any CPU manufacturer) is used to do. And not a trivial task either; there are only 2 companies doing it, apparently.

intel tried to use what they know best to compete with the GPU designers. Use their CPU knowledge to build a GPU. Theoretically it should have worked. But it never lived up to what it was supposed to do.

[Trroy]

NOT like the Cell, which was a good idea then, and still is. The Larrabee relies on an automated caching mechanism, and the Cell doesn't which is one of the things that makes the Cell both "hard" (lol) to program, and shine in performance. SPUs never suffer from a cache miss -- ever. That's miles better than spending 30% of the total core time missing on a shared cache, plain and simple. With all that wasted cache die area, you could have more cores instead... oh hey, like the Cell. ;)

Caches are crutches for the lazy -- they're great for programs written without performance in mind. Convenience graphics programming? lol.

The Larrabee was a design nightmare without any serious performance benefits. Smart of Intel to axe it. No one would have ever used it, with subpar performance to serious GPUs, and greater expense to boot.

[sikbeta]

Thanks for the info +1

[The real killer]

Updated RSX comfirmed :)

[iamgoatman]

You mean an updated 7800GTX? We've had them for years.

edit: Just to clarify, the RSX was the name given to the GPU used in the PS3.

[champ21]

LOL the RSX design was obselete when the PS3 launched. The 8800gtx puts the RSX and cell to shame even when they are working together.

Uncharted or killzone2 have to be the best looking games on the PS3. Run Crysis on a 8800gtx, and watch it look better then anything the PS3 can put out.

8800gtx is currently an ancient design. In fact its so old let me list the gpus that precede it:

9800gtx 1gen
280gtx 2gen
480gtx 3gen.

RSX is atleast 4gens old now, cant even be considered a dinosaur in todays tech terms.

[hoops]

Champ don't say this!!! You're on N4G.COM...you will get in trouble for stating truth and saying a 3 year old 8800gtx is more powerful then the almighty Cell+PS3 setup!! SHAME ON YOU!!!!

[The real killer]

Hahaha LOLOLOL

Talk like a PC boy right, think the PS3 is a PC or a 360.
Did you know that the RSX is made for the Cell architecture ;)

O, Hoops.....................LOLO LOL

[BlackIceJoe]

Well this sucks I was looking forward to Larrabee. I wonder what will happen to Project Offset? I thought that game looked like it could be good. I hope the game will not be canceled. I wonder if Larrabee is canceled if the game can now come out on the PS3 & 360.

[OpenGL]

This is not really a surprise as their last working version was having a difficult time keeping up with the 8800GTX, a card that is now almost 4 years old.

It would have been nice to see some more competition in the video card market.

[iamgoatman]

Not surprising, at last glance the performance wasn't all that great, so no wonder it's been scrapped, no point pumping more money into it.

I saw an article a few months back in PC Gamer magazine called "why laptops will kill the graphics card" and basically went onto say that Intel's hybrid chips would spell the end for traditional GPUs. Guess the author was wrong.

[Ju]

Read that blog. That's exactly what intel is doing. Moving more discrete GPU parts onto the CPU - but not using many general purpose cores to do graphics. They see no need for a discrete GPU - for their markets. Which is all kind of mobile devices. And it looks like they take a step back from gaming.

[iamgoatman]

I don't doubt that a CPU hybrid wouldn't work for certain devices, where general graphics processes can be dealt with by the CPU. But if I remember correctly the article touted the end of dedicated GPUs as a whole, and I can't see such a design being relevant for highly demanding graphics processing, such as gaming, for some time.

[SuperStrokey1123]

I guess we can expect intel to buy a graphics company soon then yes?