Share prices were up for NVIDIA and AMD today in the wake of Intel’s announcement that the first iteration of their Larrabee architecture has been delayed.
Larrabee, Intel’s first foray into the discrete graphics market in over a decade, was to arrange an array of simplified x86 cores into a heavily-parallelized architecture. As the x86 cores were not dissimilar to those found in your average processor, Intel was playing its future GPU into the expertise of the global software development community. The chip was originally intended to compete with high-end discrete offerings from both NVIDIA and AMD in 2010.
However, citing concerns over a probable miss on the targeted price/performance/power window, the first generation Larrabee architecture was repurposed on Friday to serve as a component of an SDK designed to prepare software developers for the launch of a more competitive part. While Intel stock declined marginally on the announcement, the market closed today with AMD and NVIDIA stock up 8% and 13%, respectively.
The delay comes at a critical juncture in the timeline of GPU computing, or video cards capable of handling tasks once assigned exclusively to the processor. Where once GPU architectures were proprietary and limited in their abilities, the advent of DirectX 11-compatible GPUs and APIs like OpenCL and DirectCompute have standardized the way developers write programs for GPUs without dictating what can be written. This development may harm Larrabee’s value proposition as a programmable architecture built on the most familiar ISA in the world, x86. In the time it will take for Intel to rearchitect the next generation for retail, DirectCompute and OpenCL could easily achieve similar familiarity–AMD and NVIDIA are simultaneously working to ensure it.
AMD and NVIDIA stock prices from 4 December through 7 December, 2009.
Even so, a Larrabee delay is not critical, damning or damaging for Intel. As market researcher Jon Peddie notes, Larrabee was a project for Intel, and not a product. In other words, it has always been a “when it’s ready” part, rather than a CPU scheduled on a strict cadence.
“There has never been anything like it and as such there were barriers to break and frontiers to cross, but it was all Intel’s thing. It was a project. Not a product. Not a commitment, not a contract, it was and is, an in-house project. Intel didn’t owe anybody anything,” Peddie said. “And so it was stopped. Not killed – stopped.”
“This is not the end of Larrabee as a graphics processor – this is a pause. If you build GPUs enjoy your summer vacation, the lessons will begin again,” he continued.
And so Larrabee, for now, remains shrouded in the mysterious expertise of the many Intel labs while the standing GPU market is free to go about its business. The ensuing months of Larrabee re-development will be matched with at least one completely new architecture from NVIDIA and AMD, and perhaps even the formative rumblings of DirectX 12.
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