Re: Intel needs a console deal to get Larrabee off the ground

On Sep 8, 3:08 am, n...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Nick Maclaren) wrote:

As I have told Sun over Niagara and Intel over Larrabee, that is the
wrong approach.  They need to ensure that there is a workstation with
it in (or a plug-in board or box or ...), that is affordable by the
home hackers, and get them to start playing with it.

That would be a good thing too.

If a new video game were to adopt the Larrabee chip, the way the
Playstation 3 adopted the Cell Broadband Engine, I think that this
would indeed drive the development of programs to use it effectively.
What makes me dubious about this strategy is simply that it's the
wrong time in the video game console product cycle - the PlayStation 3
and the Wii and the XBox 360 are all shiny and new; by the time
they're replaced by newer and bigger products, Larrabee will be old
news.

I do think that the current Intel strategy, of putting Larrabee on
video cards first, is wrongheaded, because there it will be an
overpriced substitute for a GPU.

Ensure that the one "big" processor keeping the 32 (or so) "little"
processors on Larrabee is a *good* processor, so the chip has decent
performance on single-threaded old-style applications, and just go
ahead and make the motherboards, and I suspect people will buy it just
to be future-proof.

And if existing software doesn't make full use of quad-core chips, the
relative slowness of cores after the first one wouldn't even be a
performance hit.

John Savard
.

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