New Larrabee silicon taped out, shown at IDF?

[josiahsuarez]

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/09/16/new-larrabee-silicon-taped-out-weeks-ago/
New Larrabee silicon taped out weeks ago
Plagues of bugs quashed
by Charlie Demerjian

September 16, 2009

IT LOOKS LIKE Larrabee, Intel's upcoming GPU++, is about to have new silicon in short order. The B0 stepping taped out about a month ago, so there should be some public showings soon.

B0 taped out on August 15, and the silicon in winding it's way through the fabs now. Even with Intel's manufacturing prowess, making those parts and bringing up the new silicon takes time. It is going to be a really close call on them making showable boards before IDF or not. Here's to hoping.

Word on the street is that Larrabee has a host of bugs which prevented public showings of the Ax silicon. This is not uncommon for a new architecture, and a new paradigm only adds to the pain. That said, almost all problems are said to be fixed in the move from Ax to B0 silicon. If schedules don't allow for the new stepping to be shown at IDF next week, expect a flood of demos at the next major conference.

From the looks of things, Larrabee is going to be pulled from a shroud of mystery and negative rumor into the light very soon. Only then will we see if it lives up to the hype or not. Game on in a matter of weeks.

IDF is September 22-24. it should be telling whether this is shown in the flesh or in PowerPoint form only.

[CaptNKILL]

This could be interesting.

I'd like to see Intel make a decent GPU for once.

[Buio]

An Charlie the Clown article without bile and talk about low yields! Ah, it wasn't about NVidia.

Regarding Larrabee it will be very interesting. It will be the first GPU that probably can do everything on the card and therefore can ignore PCI Express bus and CPU latency.

[Fotis]

I guess I'm interested in seeing some larrabee details/benchmarks but I doubt it will even come anywhere close to 5870 or GT300.

[bacon12]

This could be interesting.

I'd like to see Intel make a decent GPU for once.

If they did at a decent price and oem's used them like they do their gma igp's then it could really be the resurgence of PC gaming. I hope it succeeds as well.

[josiahsuarez]

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/9/18/pat-gelsinger-left-intel-because-of-larrabee-fiasco.aspx
Pat Gelsinger left Intel because of Larrabee fiasco?
9/18/2009 by: Theo Valich


Last week, we learned that Patrick P. Gelsinger will leave Intel for EMC and tried to find out the reason for the move. From one side, the move had perfect sense. Pat was one of Andy Groove's men, and Paul Otellini did his best to surround himself with his aces, thus the choice of Sean Maloney was logical.

But the underlying issue wasn't that Pat was "Andy Groove's men", the issue was the war with nVidia and under-delivering on Larrabee.

As we all know, Larrabee project has been problematic at best. Intel start hyping up Larrabee long before it was ready, and the project broke all deadlines. We read through roadmaps and watched Larrabee slip not by quarters, but by years. After we saw roadmaps for introduction of Larrabee pushed back all the way to 2011, and hearing that a lot of key industry analysts are dismayed at Intel - Pat's maneuvering capability was cut to a single corner.
A lot of people we talked to were disappointed at Intel "starting a war with nVidia without a product to compete", and after hearing statements such as "Intel is a chip company, not a PowerPoint company", it was clear to us that Intel seriously "screwed the pooch" on this one.

There is no doubt in our minds that Intel is going to deliver Larrabee, as it is the future of the company. But Intel will probably spend additional billion or so USD on making the chip work [because it is quintessentially broken in hardware, we haven't even touched the software side], and come to market with a complete line-up. But unlike the CPU division that only missed Lynnfield [Core i5-700, i7-800 series] roadmap by six months, project Larrabee is now a year late, and according to documents we saw, it won't reach the market in the next 12 months. This will put a 45nm Larrabee against 28nm next-gen chips from ATI and nVidia, even though we know the caveat of using 45nm Fabs for the job. According to our sources, in 2011 both ATI and nVidia will offer parts with around 5-7TFLOPS of compute power, surpassing 10TFLOPS on the dual-ASIC parts. According to information at hand, Intel targeted 1+ TFLOPS of compute power for the first generation, i.e. less number crunching performance than ATI Radeon HD 4870 and nVidia GeForce GTX 285. With Larrabee coming in 2011, the company did revise that number to raise available performance.

We learned about the estimated cost of Larrabee project, and if there wasn't for best-selling Core 2 series, this project would seriously undermine Intel's ability to compete. To conclude this article - Larrabee was Gelsinger's baby, project got seriously messed up and somebody had to pay the bill. Patrick is staying in Santa Clara though, almost on the same address. Given his new job, Patrick P. Gelsinger simply moved from 2200 Mission College Blvd [Robert N. Noyce building, i.e. Intel HQ], to 2831 Mission College Blvd [EMC HQ].

[Viral]

Charlies story seems to contradict other recent news like that posted above.

[Buio]

Charlies story seems to contradict other recent news like that posted above.

Damn he gets a lot of posts and coverage. I guess his tactics works.
-----

Well Larrabee will be interesting whatever delays. It's a totally new concept, hope it can deliver at least some iteration in the future. I would not mind a Intel graphics card if it's good.

[Muppet]

That doesn't look good for Intel at all. It's a shame if true, because competition is always healthy. Especially for us, the end user.

[josiahsuarez]

well they did show it, here's a youtube video of ray tracing in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FKBMct21g

at least it works.....

[josiahsuarez]

here's a longer video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5TGA-IE85o