Will history repeat itself? Intel's setting out to make a name for itself in the discrete GPU space with its upcoming Xe-HP GPU lineup. We look at Project Larrabee - the last time Intel tried making a graphics card - to understand how things might turn out.
https://www.techspot.com/article/2125-intel-last-graphics-card/
It was true at the time of Larrabee's development, 12 or so years ago (e.g. the GeForce GTX 200 era). It's definitely not the case now, of course.
Cuda was released a couple years before that, and tools like Lib/SH and Accelerator even earlier. But ignoring that, the point I was making was the article was expressing present tense, not past.
At the time of Larrabee's development ATI and Nvidia were both shipping cards with pixel pipelines and vertex sharder cores. Not unified shaders. And while ATI was clearly the first to really deep drive into unified shaders and put them in a consumer product, ATI's R400 was a unified shader design that was scrapped. In its place ATI's R300 tech was quickly scaled up to become the x800 series. The R400 chip would later be upgraded to the R500, which a version of only ever saw use on the xbox 360. Older DX9 games didn't favor the design change, and that was clearly shown when DX10 cards came to market.
Brilliantly said, I think this is the main point why intel decided to strengthen their GPU division: To keep their OEM customers. Probably they were afraid to lose the OEM market to AMD.
Intel released their details on Larrabee at Siggraph 2008 and informally stated that they were stopping development in making a discrete graphics card in May 2010. So if one assumes that Intel started working on Larrabee from, say, 2005 then that first 3 year period definitely had unified shader products on the market. ATi were already using a unified shader architecture in the Xbox 360 (2005). The first shipped PC graphics card with unified shaders were Nvidia's GeForce 8 series in November 2006 and ATi's Radeon HD 2000 series in June 2007.
Definitely doomed
but I would argue that Intel hadn't so much overlooked it, but simply thought that they could do better.
I'm sure they were simply attempting to avoid cannibalizing their CPU market. That may not have been as immediately ruinous a decision as Kodak's decision to avoid digital cameras to avoid harming film sales, but in the long run it may run a close second.
Back then, though, it wasn't as lucrative as it is now - take Nvidia's financials from 2005 to 2010, where it ranged from $2b to $3b revenue, and highly variable net incomes. That may have been a factor behind the lack of commitment to pushing out a discrete graphics card, especially compared to how much money they were raking in from their processor division.
This is a good point, and perhaps ties in with the above - Core was clearly such a success, both architecturally and financially, that releasing any product that might damage that market or their image could well have stopped Larrabee from ever becoming nothing more than an engineering experiment.
That's true but they also threw money at things that were complete failures like Ultrabooks. I remember Charlie Demerjian's less-than-complimentary assessment of Intel's "fiscal responsibility" so I still always found it odd.
IMO Intel had to chose a design path right away, and unified shader products like you said didn't really hit the market until the end of 2006. While we did have the 360 early on, from a performance perspective it wasn't much faster than hardware at the time. So I understand Intel's engineers choice to go a different route from what was previously the norm, when they had so little experience.
Looking at what I'd say are the majority of OEM systems with a dGPU, they usually have a 16xx series card (at best) or MX graphics in the case of laptops. If I were at Intel, I'd want that part of the BOM, particularly since being on par with that level of cards should be a lot easier than going for the gaming crown.
