[bsn] Intel cans consumer Larrabee: Compatibility, Performance and nVidia?

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rico2001

Discussion Starter · Dec 5, 2009

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Intel cans consumer Larrabee: Compatibility, Performance and nVidia?

In our extensive coverage of Intel's project Larrabee, one question persisted: is it worth for Intel to invest billions of dollars on a market that cannot be dominated? Intel Larrabee as a desktop card for consumers - is dead. As a consequence of a chain of events, Intel's executive management decided to stop pouring millions of dollars in a bird that failed to fly.

As of Friday, December 4, 2009 Intel decided to stop investing into Larrabee as a consumer project. In a statement given to us by Nick Knupffer, who worked as Intel's spokesman for Larrabee, it was stated that "Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to
be at this point in the project. As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product, but rather be used as a software development platform for internal and external use."

The news comes after the negative reaction by analysts and the press over the last two public presentations at IDF Fall 2009 in San Francisco [CA] and SC09 in Portland [OR]. After a lot of effort and overclocking, Larrabee did manage to reach 1TFLOPS in SGEMM performance test.

However, the problems with Larrabee were all too great. As we wrote in our detailed analysis, Intel sank over three billion dollars [estimate, grand number will probably never be known] into the project, and according to our highly-positioned sources - it needed another billion to billion and a half to make it work. But even the sudden departure of an executive that led the project would not solve the quintessential problem - AMD and nVidia not just created GPUs that support the IEEE 754-2008 specification but are also unbelievably fast.

According to the benchmark used, the AMD Radeon HD 5850 puts out 750 GFLOPS, bringing it very close to LRB figures. We don't have a number for the Radeon HD 5870 because we simply don't have any 5870 boards in our BSN* Labs at this moment and naturally, our HD 5970 only runs off a single GPU at 775 MHz, so it is not exactly the top performer. This is due, in part, to the fact that the benchmark does not support multiple GPU cores...

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