I think it was really obvious up front that Larrabee wasn't going to have enough graphics-specific hardware on the chip for it to have a chance at being a compe

I think it was really obvious up front that Larrabee wasn't going to have enough graphics-specific hardware on the chip for it to have a chance at being a competitive GPU for consumer gaming. At best, they were aiming for a heavily compute-oriented chip that could also do graphics, but for graphics tasks it was going to be heavily reliant on brute forcing the problem with a large, expensive chip. So a bit further toward the compute-oriented end of the spectrum than any of the GPU microarchitectures than any of the GPUs AMD or NVIDIA have shipped. And it ended up that it was only viable for compute tasks if they stripped out the rest of the graphics hardware, and x86 compatibility wasn't enough to overcome NVIDIA's lead in GPGPU software support. If Intel could have brought Larrabee to market with fabrication two nodes ahead of NVIDIA/AMD, it probably could have been successful. But Intel has a pretty solid track record of being unable to maintain two competitive microarchitectures at the same time, and I don't think they've ever quite been two full nodes ahead.