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@ 2008/08/19If you're going to get Larrabee, you need to understand that it is an ideological chip. What do I mean by "ideological" when it comes to a graphics chip?
The question for Intel is, "How can we most leverage our advantages in the chip industry and turn our competitors' ways of doing business into disadvantages?"
The short answer is Larrabee (and future derivatives). The longer explanation is "We design a computing world based on a swarm of x86 processors that we can build cheaper than our competition's because we have better chip-making technology than our competitors. We're going to try this out on the graphics industry first."
Did you notice I didn't say anything about performance? That's because Intel doesn't need to win in order to succeed. Larrabee doesn't have to be too good; at least not initially, but it does have to be cheap.
The question for Intel is, "How can we most leverage our advantages in the chip industry and turn our competitors' ways of doing business into disadvantages?"
The short answer is Larrabee (and future derivatives). The longer explanation is "We design a computing world based on a swarm of x86 processors that we can build cheaper than our competition's because we have better chip-making technology than our competitors. We're going to try this out on the graphics industry first."
Did you notice I didn't say anything about performance? That's because Intel doesn't need to win in order to succeed. Larrabee doesn't have to be too good; at least not initially, but it does have to be cheap.
But regardless, Larrabee is designed to be a supercomputing chip on a card. Look at NVIDIA's CUDA and just how far that accelerated any sort of application that can use it. Whether you fold proteins, encode videos in real time, or do advanced 3D simulations or 3D rendering, it is superior to using a few dozen Quadcore CPUs. That is the new, fledgling market and Intel saw it coming and is about to try and capitalize on it.