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This isn't a space I pretend to understand in detail, but Cantrill's objections to Larrabee here seem confusing. With hindsight, Intel abandoning Larrabee has b

by roenxi 2y ago

This isn't a space I pretend to understand in detail, but Cantrill's objections to Larrabee here seem confusing. With hindsight, Intel abandoning Larrabee has been a disaster and they should have sustained the effort to develop a great GPGPU chip. Without taking any position at all on Gelsinger's execution his strategic vision seems to have be supported by what happened in practice after his attempt. If Intel had been practising making discrete GPU from 2009 to 2024 instead of giving up then it does seem quite reasonable that Nvidia would be a quarter of its size. One of the obvious mis-steps Intel made over the last 20 years was failing to keep trying Larrabee-style chips until they figured out how to make them work. Ok version 1 might be a disaster and version 2 might be bad. But we're looking back over almost 20 years! There was a lot of room to figure out how to be good and tap in to the huge new market that was opening up.

ekeane 2y ago
Intel has a habit of coming up with great ideas, then deciding that they aren't immediately successful or immediately 60+% gross margins, so it clearly isn't worth following up. Intel's R&D department is a grave yard of great products murdered at the alter of Gross Margin. Larrabee is one such product. It wasn't immediately great, and didn't immediately promise great returns, and didn't quite have a market yet, so it was killed. I can't imagine where Intel would be in the AI world if they had the foresight to stick with Larrabee.
- brookst 2y ago
  Yep. Intel has no patience. They have high margin businesses throwing off lots of cash, so the finance-driven culture says “why waste money on risky new things that can’t possibly equal that level of profitability in the short term?” Somehow they forgot that all of their highly profitably businesses were risky bets at one time.
  - josephg 2y ago
    Right. Google has the same problem. Any time they create a new product, it’s a coin flip on whether or not it’ll still be around in a year or two. I’ve steered multiple companies away from Google’s offerings because I just don’t think you should trust that any of their newer products will still be around in 5-10 years. Good on them for sticking with their promises for firebase. But it’s a pity about stadia. Don’t bet your business on a flip of the Google coin.
  - bjornsing 2y ago
    > Somehow they forgot that all of their highly profitably businesses were risky bets at one time. And that all of their highly profitable businesses are risky bets long term.
wmf 2y ago
What if they kept trying on Larrabee and it never worked?
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  What if aliens came and made everything obsolete? In an infinite universe, anything can happen, and so "it might not work" is is always true for everything. No matter what you do, it might not work, and some of the most important and valuable things ever aren't attainable without a lot of investment before you can start to reap any return. Not all ideas are good ideas, so of course there are reasons not to do some things, or to abandon something you started, but merely "what if it never works" is not one. Asking that is about equal to asking what if a piano falls on you tomorrow. Sure it could happen, but so what? What does that change? If you don't walk down the street for fear of pianos, you don't get to the grocery store or your job and then you die from starving instead of from a piano.
- lowbloodsugar 2y ago
  Which was a reasonable possibility. Larabee was a daft idea. It was never going to work, let alone at consumer prices and power.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bcantrill 2y ago
To be clear, I think that they should have kept iterating on Larrabee (though I would have liked to see it with an open software architecture). With respect to Larrabee, my shock was that Gelsinger had such confidence that iterating on Larrabee would have resulted in an NVIDIA of one-quarter its current size (or one-quarter the size when he recorded the interview in 2019). That's the bit that's bonkers to me: yes, they should have kept iterating (though some acknowledgement from Gelsinger that the first iteration was plagued with problems, not all of them technical[0]) -- but success was emphatically not assured just because it was Intel. [0] https://brightsideofnews.com/blog/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed/ https://brightsideofnews.com/blog/an-inconvenient-truth-inte...
- MBCook 2y ago
  If they had kept going, and really got it working, their fab advantage might have let them really go after Nvidia. In an absolute best case scenario, he may be right. But that seems incredibly unlikely. Still, they should’ve had a much MUCH better GPU story than they did.
  - nemothekid 2y ago
    >their fab advantage might have let them really go after Nvidia. I think Cantrill spelled it out in the article, and I think people are overlooking (and for some reason really continue to overlook, or just have no idea) that nvidia's advantage is Software. I remember Larabee as a teenager - I just graduated high school, the forums were talking about it, and I had finally saved enough money to buy an 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was also coincidentally, the first consumer GPU to support CUDA. Almost 2 decades later and it feels like nvidia has an insurmountable moat in AI due to CUDA. This wasn't an accident, nvidia spent a ton of time, with developers, getting it right. FTA: >that NVIDIA had an indisputable lead, even in 2009; that for Intel to dominate NVIDIA it would have required conjuring software expertise and focus with which Intel has famously struggled Ignoring this piece is huge in claming that nvidia would be a quarter of the size. Can you even imagine Intel investing in a non-x86 developer platform for 15 years while they were in the lead?
boulos 2y ago
It was 15 years ago today that it was cancelled (https://web.archive.org/web/20100106162815/http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10409715-64.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100106162815/http://news.cnet....). You need to remember that was during the financial crisis, and the first chips were going to be laughably bad and uncompetitive. From the quote in that article: > Justin Rattner (Intel Senior Fellow) demonstrated Larrabee hitting one teraflop, which is great but you could walk across the street and buy an ATI graphics board for a few hundred dollars that would do five teraflops. Intel had no chance for v0 to do anything but lose money. They were way off track, and spent most of the time trying to get to a software rasterizer plus hardware that could work for some games. They did pivot Larrabee into the various Knight chips (Knights Corner, Landing and whatever else) since the "it's just x86" was a pretty compelling story in the 2009 era. But ultimately, HPC wasn't that great a market in the early 2010s for accelerators yet and NVIDIA ended up totally eating their lunch over time. I think Intel could have stuck with the HPC market and gotten lucky once ML exploded, but realistically until about 5 years ago there wasn't that much ML spending yet either. 10 years of last place discrete GPU work would have been difficult to invest in. tl;dr: the business case for Larrabee hinged on having a successful gaming business and it wasn't even close.

by roenxi 2y ago

ekeane 2y ago

Intel has a habit of coming up with great ideas, then deciding that they aren't immediately successful or immediately 60+% gross margins, so it clearly isn't worth following up. Intel's R&D department is a grave yard of great products murdered at the alter of Gross Margin. Larrabee is one such product. It wasn't immediately great, and didn't immediately promise great returns, and didn't quite have a market yet, so it was killed. I can't imagine where Intel would be in the AI world if they had the foresight to stick with Larrabee.

brookst 2y ago
Yep. Intel has no patience. They have high margin businesses throwing off lots of cash, so the finance-driven culture says “why waste money on risky new things that can’t possibly equal that level of profitability in the short term?” Somehow they forgot that all of their highly profitably businesses were risky bets at one time.
- josephg 2y ago
  Right. Google has the same problem. Any time they create a new product, it’s a coin flip on whether or not it’ll still be around in a year or two. I’ve steered multiple companies away from Google’s offerings because I just don’t think you should trust that any of their newer products will still be around in 5-10 years. Good on them for sticking with their promises for firebase. But it’s a pity about stadia. Don’t bet your business on a flip of the Google coin.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  > Somehow they forgot that all of their highly profitably businesses were risky bets at one time. And that all of their highly profitable businesses are risky bets long term.

wmf 2y ago

What if they kept trying on Larrabee and it never worked?

Brian_K_White 2y ago
What if aliens came and made everything obsolete? In an infinite universe, anything can happen, and so "it might not work" is is always true for everything. No matter what you do, it might not work, and some of the most important and valuable things ever aren't attainable without a lot of investment before you can start to reap any return. Not all ideas are good ideas, so of course there are reasons not to do some things, or to abandon something you started, but merely "what if it never works" is not one. Asking that is about equal to asking what if a piano falls on you tomorrow. Sure it could happen, but so what? What does that change? If you don't walk down the street for fear of pianos, you don't get to the grocery store or your job and then you die from starving instead of from a piano.
lowbloodsugar 2y ago
Which was a reasonable possibility. Larabee was a daft idea. It was never going to work, let alone at consumer prices and power.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bcantrill 2y ago

To be clear, I think that they should have kept iterating on Larrabee (though I would have liked to see it with an open software architecture). With respect to Larrabee, my shock was that Gelsinger had such confidence that iterating on Larrabee would have resulted in an NVIDIA of one-quarter its current size (or one-quarter the size when he recorded the interview in 2019). That's the bit that's bonkers to me: yes, they should have kept iterating (though some acknowledgement from Gelsinger that the first iteration was plagued with problems, not all of them technical[0]) -- but success was emphatically not assured just because it was Intel. [0] https://brightsideofnews.com/blog/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed/ https://brightsideofnews.com/blog/an-inconvenient-truth-inte...

MBCook 2y ago
If they had kept going, and really got it working, their fab advantage might have let them really go after Nvidia. In an absolute best case scenario, he may be right. But that seems incredibly unlikely. Still, they should’ve had a much MUCH better GPU story than they did.
- nemothekid 2y ago
  >their fab advantage might have let them really go after Nvidia. I think Cantrill spelled it out in the article, and I think people are overlooking (and for some reason really continue to overlook, or just have no idea) that nvidia's advantage is Software. I remember Larabee as a teenager - I just graduated high school, the forums were talking about it, and I had finally saved enough money to buy an 8800GTX. The 8800GTX was also coincidentally, the first consumer GPU to support CUDA. Almost 2 decades later and it feels like nvidia has an insurmountable moat in AI due to CUDA. This wasn't an accident, nvidia spent a ton of time, with developers, getting it right. FTA: >that NVIDIA had an indisputable lead, even in 2009; that for Intel to dominate NVIDIA it would have required conjuring software expertise and focus with which Intel has famously struggled Ignoring this piece is huge in claming that nvidia would be a quarter of the size. Can you even imagine Intel investing in a non-x86 developer platform for 15 years while they were in the lead?

boulos 2y ago

It was 15 years ago today that it was cancelled (https://web.archive.org/web/20100106162815/http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10409715-64.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100106162815/http://news.cnet....). You need to remember that was during the financial crisis, and the first chips were going to be laughably bad and uncompetitive. From the quote in that article: > Justin Rattner (Intel Senior Fellow) demonstrated Larrabee hitting one teraflop, which is great but you could walk across the street and buy an ATI graphics board for a few hundred dollars that would do five teraflops. Intel had no chance for v0 to do anything but lose money. They were way off track, and spent most of the time trying to get to a software rasterizer plus hardware that could work for some games. They did pivot Larrabee into the various Knight chips (Knights Corner, Landing and whatever else) since the "it's just x86" was a pretty compelling story in the 2009 era. But ultimately, HPC wasn't that great a market in the early 2010s for accelerators yet and NVIDIA ended up totally eating their lunch over time. I think Intel could have stuck with the HPC market and gotten lucky once ML exploded, but realistically until about 5 years ago there wasn't that much ML spending yet either. 10 years of last place discrete GPU work would have been difficult to invest in. tl;dr: the business case for Larrabee hinged on having a successful gaming business and it wasn't even close.