

Intel kills consumer Larrabee - DarkShikari
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/12/04/intel-kills-consumer-larrabee-focuses-future-variants/

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thristian
Man, this was my last hope at having decently-performing graphics hardware
with well-written and well-supported Linux drivers.

Maybe someday AMD will release enough information about ATi's cards that the
open-source drivers will become as reliable and featureful as Intel's...

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miloshh
Not sure what you mean, NVIDIA hardware works great on Linux and I use it on a
daily basis.

Are you referring to the fact that NVIDIA's drivers aren't open-source? Well,
there is no reason to expect that Larrabee's would have been.

In any case, there is probably nothing interesting in the driver source code
anyway. (A lot of "copy this buffer of instructions to the GPU, this buffer
back" and not much else.)

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thristian
My understanding is that a lot of new X11 features (such as XRandR, GEM memory
managment, kernel mode-setting and so forth) are added to the core and to the
open-source drivers, and closed-source drivers lag behind significantly. Also,
I've a friend with an nVidia-based laptop, and suspend/resume apparently works
about one time in ten, while it worked flawlessly on my Intel-based laptop.

Also, apart from the Paulsbro/GMA500 fiasco (which was contracted out to a
third party), all Intel's graphics hardware has had open-source drivers
written by Intel themselves, so it doesn't seem too extreme to expect similar
support for Larrabee.

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miloshh
> it doesn't seem too extreme to expect similar support for Larrabee

You have a point, but I think the reason NVIDIA doesn't open-source the
drivers is the same as the reason Larrabee _probably_ wouldn't open-source
them - i.e. fear of releasing the details of the GPU design to the
competition. Current Intel's graphics has nothing to hide from NVIDIA, but
Lrrabee would. But of course, this is just speculation, especially now that no
consumer Larrabee is on the horizon...

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yason
Isn't the great thing about consumer GPU processing like Nvidia's Cuda that
it's pretty much everywhere, even in consumer devices? So that some research
guy can convert his number-crunching code to run in parallel with Cuda right
on his own workstation and see if it works.

If it does, then he can later put it up and running on a more efficient server
or cluster. But initially he gets to try if X times speed up works for him,
without getting any special hardware just to try out.

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DaniFong
Disappointing but not terribly surprising. The programming expertise just
isn't there for consumer applications, yet, whereas for HPC many problems come
close to being embarrassingly parallel.

Oh well. Another time, perhaps.

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MikeCapone
That's too bad. More competition in the consumer market would probably have
been good for consumers and for the pace of technological progress.

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tyweir
The article mentions a shift in focus, from consumer to HPC/Development.

I doubt it's gone forever, maybe just delayed.

I think the consumer market for Larabee is much smaller than HPC, so it makes
sense for Intel to chase that money instead.

