HPCwire: Analysts Speculate on Larrabee Flap

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

December 11, 2009

Analysts Speculate on Larrabee Flap

As we reported on Monday, the life story of Intel's manycore GPU processor architecture, codenamed "Larrabee," has taken an interesting twist. Late last week, the company canceled the rollout of the first Larrabee product, slated to debut next year, while leaving the door open to future graphics and HPC offerings. IT analysts reacted in force, offering a range of speculation on Intel's decision and what the company's next move might be.

Like many graphics industry watchers, analyst Jon Peddie figured Intel looked at the flattening growth numbers for discrete GPUs and decided Larrabee didn't have what it takes to compete in a tightening market. But he's less sure if Intel will regroup and make a second stab at a discrete GPU platform or switch the focus of the technology to HPC.

In his blog this week, Peddie implied -- as Intel also seemed to do in their brief announcement -- that the next step for the technology would, in fact, be in high performance computing:

Intel has made a hard decision and we think a correct one. Larrabee silicon was pretty much proven, and the demonstration at SC09 of measured performance hitting 1 TFLOPS (albeit with a little clock tweaking) on a SGEMM Performance test (4K by 4K Matrix Multiply) was impressive. Interestingly it was a computer measurement, not a graphics measurement. Maybe the die had been cast then (no pun intended) with regard to Larrabee’s future.

Of course, 1 teraflop of single precision (for an overclocked chip, by the way) is no great shakes for GPUs these days. Although SGEMM benchmark results are unavailable for NVIDIA and AMD GPU silicon, in general, graphics chips are already well into multi-teraflop territory, with even more performance on the way. And as NVIDIA quickly found out, most of the action in HPC is in the double precision arena anyway.

GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham opines that Intel maybe tried to push the x86 beyond its natural abilities by forcing it into the GPU mold. She writes this week:

For Intel, the question becomes, how far can the x86 architecture stretch? Its Larrabee delay suggests that using x86 to develop a decent graphics processor may work, but it can’t compete against specialty GPUs.

The implication here is that Intel learned the wrong lesson from Itanium, that is, x86 compatibility trumps everything else. In the case of discrete GPUs, that's less likely to be true. The software ecosystem is focused at the API level (e.g., OpenGL and DirectX) rather than the ISA. But for general-purpose GPU computing, x86 compatibility still may make some sense. Like Peddie, Higginbotham thinks the second coming of Larrabee is likely to appear in HPC.

Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, also expects Intel to deliver a new and improved Larrabee. He writes:

Eventually, although not before 2011, a next generation Larrabee will emerge. Intel always learns from its mistakes, so this new design will avoid the problems that crippled the first generation design. They can replace the archaic Pentium-era core used in the Gen 1 Larrabee with their new, power-efficient Atom core (that was not yet complete when they started Gen 1 in 2007) and thus tame the chip’s power appetite.

However Brookwood goes on to say that the delay blunts Intel's natural advantage in x86 software, since OpenCL, DirectCompute and CUDA will be that much more mature two years down the road. He points to the recent SC09 conference as evidence of how much momentum has already beem built around GPU computing.

The wildest reaction to the Larrabee news comes from industry reporter Bob Cringely, whose commentary headline says it all: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA. Cringely speculates that Intel wants NVIDIA mainly for its integrated Tegra chips for mobile platforms, and had to get rid of Larrabee to remove the appearance of creating an uncompetitive GPU market. He writes:

.Intel had to do something the minute AMD bought ATi. Now with Larrabee gone Intel has no real choice but to buy another company to remain in contention. The only such company available is nVIDIA.

He also speculated that the resolution of the Intel-AMD lawsuit was a setup to prevent AMD from objecting to a future Intel-NVIDIA merger. If you're a fan of corporate intrigue, you'll love Cringely's take on the situation. But this merger idea has a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that these two companies are fundamentally incompatible. As Jon Peddie writes in a follow-on blog post: "The cultural differences, acrimony, and belligerences between Intel and Nvidia run so deep it would be impossible to blend the organizations without a few homicides." Having seen NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang espouse this business philosophy at the recent GPU Technology Conference, I tend to agree.

My take is that it's still too early to count Intel out of the GPU computing game. Although this latest delay isn't going to help its cause, the overall idea of using a manycore, vector-accelerated x86 design for general-purpose data parallel apps is a reasonable strategy. The chipmaker's biggest mistake is that it tried to shoot at two fast-moving targets -- traditional graphics and GPGPU -- without the software expertise to pull it together. I don't think they'll make the same mistake again.

Posted by Michael Feldman - December 11 @ 7:35AM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html