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There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processi

There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU. But what's interesting is that in the article, he said that the Intel GFX dep. were "begging to let them build a GPGPU", and he might have been exagerating but he made it seem like all they needed was to slap some ROPs and texture units on that thing. That makes me question wether we'll be seeing a brand new architecture, or an Intel HD unleashed edition with some GDDR5.

nl 8y ago
There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU. Great. Except the kind of parallel processing Larrabee was supposed to provide isn't something anyone wanted. It's a half-pregnant architecture. Not parallel enough to compete with GPUs, not enough single thread performance to compete with Intel's own CPUs.
- sgift 8y ago
  Should have told that the Tianhe-2, which uses Xeon Phis (aka Larabee 2013 and later) and was the fastest super computer for multiple years.
- dTal 8y ago
  As someone who was doing enormous amounts of CPU-bound raytracing at the time, I wanted it. But quite honestly the product sounds absolutely incredible even without workloads like that - to read the article, it worked perfectly well as a graphics card, with the added bonus that 1) the graphics code was in software, meaning you could arbitrarily upgrade the graphics model to support later software, and 2) the system also ran general purpose loads, simultaneously.
voxadam 8y ago
I think the article that you're thinking of is "Why didn't Larrabee fail?" by Tom Forsyth. http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html# http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#
vaidyk 8y ago
There was also this fantastic series of articles by Matt Pharr (of Physically Based Rendering fame) - http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html While it's focused on ISPC (https://ispc.github.io https://ispc.github.io) it does go into a lot of detail about what happened at Intel during the Larrabee & post Larrabee days.

nl 8y ago

There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU. Great. Except the kind of parallel processing Larrabee was supposed to provide isn't something anyone wanted. It's a half-pregnant architecture. Not parallel enough to compete with GPUs, not enough single thread performance to compete with Intel's own CPUs.

sgift 8y ago
Should have told that the Tianhe-2, which uses Xeon Phis (aka Larabee 2013 and later) and was the fastest super computer for multiple years.
dTal 8y ago
As someone who was doing enormous amounts of CPU-bound raytracing at the time, I wanted it. But quite honestly the product sounds absolutely incredible even without workloads like that - to read the article, it worked perfectly well as a graphics card, with the added bonus that 1) the graphics code was in software, meaning you could arbitrarily upgrade the graphics model to support later software, and 2) the system also ran general purpose loads, simultaneously.

voxadam 8y ago

I think the article that you're thinking of is "Why didn't Larrabee fail?" by Tom Forsyth. http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html# http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#

vaidyk 8y ago

There was also this fantastic series of articles by Matt Pharr (of Physically Based Rendering fame) - http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html While it's focused on ISPC (https://ispc.github.io https://ispc.github.io) it does go into a lot of detail about what happened at Intel during the Larrabee & post Larrabee days.