Summary

A lot has been said about Intel's Larrabee, the chip that was supposed to propel Intel into the graphics space and devastate AMD and nVidia. Sadly, Intel missed a lot of internal targets. After a recent conversation with several engineers that mentioned "we need another 13-18 months to get [Larrabee] out", the alarm bell just went off.

Analysis

For a company of Intel's stature, nobody could expect that a project such as Larrabee would develop in the way it has. In fact, according to information gathered over the years - LRB just doesn't look like an Intel project at all [read: sloppy execution, wrong management decisions]. The amounts of leaks we received over the course of the past years simply surprised us; on several occasions, we had the opportunity of seeing internal roadmaps and hearing about frustrations regarding unrealistic expectations from the management - Intel's own internal roadmaps originally cited "sampling in 2008", then "Release in 2008", "Release in 2009". By summer 2008, I saw "mid-2009", "H2 2009," changing to "2010", "H2 2010" and  a recent conversation with several engineers disclosed "we need another 13-18 months to get [Larrabee] out".
In a lot of ways, Larrabee had a lot of issues even before Intel had committed to the project. Intel pondered about doing LRB for years, but the CPU-centric company was in love with the idea of having a Pentium 4 reaching 10 GHz [ with 20 GHz ALUs] and be strong enough to power graphics as well. This was the same line of thought as Sony took with IBM Cell Processor - originally, PlayStation 3 was supposed to have two Cell CPUs at 4GHz each. After that idea went bust, nVidia got the hot potato to make a PS3 graphics chip with less than 12 months to launch. With Larrabee, we can't exactly call Imagination Technologies being the savior.
As a consequence, Intel was always ridiculed by gaming development teams and cursed upon whenever a publisher would force that the game supports Intel's integrated graphics - resulting in a paradox of having the best CPU and the worst GPU [several key developers warned me to never describe Intel's graphics as a "GPU"]. In fact, during the preparation of this story a certain affair involving GMA graphics and driver optimizations in 3DMark Vantage broke out courtesy of Tech Report. Tim Sweeney of Epic Games lacked courtesy when it comes to Intel's graphics capabilities commenting that "Intel's integrated graphics just don't work. I don't think they will ever work." But that statement could be considered as courtesy compared to his latter statement "[Intel] always say 'Oh, we know it has never worked before, but the next generation ...' It has always been the next generation. They go from one generation to the next one and to the next one. They're not faster now than they have been at any time in the past."
"GPU is dead" and the war with nVidia
In the spring of last year, a certain Intel engineer stated that the "GPU is dead", a statement which was reiterated by now former Intel exec, Pat Gelsinger at IDF Spring 2008. Pat took charge of Larrabee and was certain that this architecture was the future of Intel. We agree 100% with Pat that the future of not just Intel, but AMD as well, as Larrabee is a merger between the CPU and the GPU. The only problem is, Intel sparked a war with nVidia without even having working silicon [ok, silicon capable of displaying a picture]. And that was a big mistake. The moment Jen-Hsun saw the comments made by Intel engineers and later statements by Intel execs at IDF Spring 2008 in Shanghai, Jen-Hsun "opened a can of whoop-ass" on Intel. Luckily for Intel, Jen-Hsun didn't have the GT300 silicon either, but GT200 was at the gates.
The strained relationship between the two got into a state of war when Intel started talking to OEMs and claiming that nVidia does not have the right to create chipsets for Nehalem [QPI - Quick Path Interface] and Lynnfield [CSI - Common System Interface]. Upon request, we were shown a cross-license deal between Intel and nVidia. I am not going to disclose which side showed it to me, since technically - the source did something it wasn't supposed to do.
The wording in the original document, as far as my laic understanding, does not bar nVidia from making chipsets for Intel even after Front Side Bus is dead, because both QPI and CSI qualify as a "processor interconnect", regardless of what either party is saying. If you wonder why this cross-license agreement is of key importance for Larrabee, the reason is simple: without nVidia patents, there is no Larrabee. There are no integrated chipsets either, since they would infringe nVidia's patents as well.
Intel's IDF Larrabee demo
During IDF Fall 2009 held few weeks ago, Intel showed Larrabee in working form for the first time in history. During early 2009, we saw Larrabee as a wafer in the hands of Patrick P. Gelsinger, but no working parts. At IDF Fall 2009 in San Francisco, the system was shown running Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on Larrabee silicon. But there was no Pat hosting the tech part of the keynote.Where is Larrabee today?
The question you're probably asking yourself is "Is Larrabee dead?" and the answer we can give you is a flat out - NO. Intel knows that the future of the company is at stake: if AMD successfully fuses its CPU technology with ATI's GPU technology and if nVidia implements an ARM core inside the GPU, Intel has to have an answer to that.
Too much money and human resources are invested in Larrabee to just let it go. Instead, Intel moved the best of the best, so called "Champions of Intel" into the Larrabee group.
Detailed analysis available here: http://bit.ly/INTCLRB

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