News Working Prototype of Intel’s Failed Larrabee GPU Sells for $5,000 on eBay

[Admin]

A Larrabee board, Intel's 2008 attempt to make a GPU, has sold on eBay France for over $5,000.

Working Prototype of Intel’s Failed Larrabee GPU Sells for $5,000 on eBay : Read more

 

[Howardohyea]

really interesting in my opinion, nice to read about a bit of technical background about a piece of hardware instead of just "someone sold a GPU".

The fact that Intel used CPU cores for graphics rendering is a really fast way to develop a graphics card, but yeah, the graphics only performance won't be good. That's why graphics cards are considered ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits)

 

[Historical Fidelity]

Very interesting article, I appreciate intel’s novel approach to their first foray into the graphics card segment

 

[DieReineGier]

This card woulkd complement my i740-based card that I bought on ebay too.

The article leaves the impression that CUDA was influenced by Larrabee, but CUDA was first. Larrabee was started because Intel was afraid of loosing high performance computing market share to GPGPUs.

Larrabee had its very own SIMD instruction set incompatible to any SSE or AVX implementation on regular Intel CPUs. Some instructions were kind of weird just to not infringe on patents held by others. Very interesting architecture. It actually ran flavors of BSD (I saw) and Linux (I heard of), some parts optionally had their own permanent storage and network connection!