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.archi

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.