Larrabee not quite dead

[Cogman]

Sure, but in their defense they were kinda guided to have those expectations by the same folks who want to be taken seriously when they say Itanium will not be killed, that Intel was getting in the mobile phones (Xscale era), was getting into HDTV, and that Atom is taking over the mobile sector before ARM gets there...

Small note, Itanium is very much alive and being actively developed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Superdome

HP has been using Itanium processors since their inception. The Itaniums have seen performance increases comparable to those of their x86 cousins.

Now, it may be on a death spiral. However, it has been said to be dead almost since its inception.

 

[lol123]

Well I wasn't being sarcastic, that was my point, the GTX480 was more than competitive with, and a year ahead of Larrabee in getting to the market, so Intel really had no choice based on these numbers to throw in the towel at 45nm.

Add to that that the development of a competitive stock software renderer (necessary at least for legacy DirectX and OpenGL, whereas the more capable game developers could very well develop their own renderers) probably just isn't ready yet, even though Intel has some of the best people in the industry working on it. That just adds to the fact that planning a final release for consumer use in 2009 was completely insane, at no fault of the architecture or the developers but of the expectations of management.

 

[ydnas7]

Itanium was, is and will be HP's big iron.
for as long as HP wants to compete (which it does) in the big iron room, Intel will supply them.
either HP has to abandon this market segment, or buy Itanium, it has no other option.

'Itanium has grown into a $4 billion per year business for the chipmaker. Now, this $4 billion number is a lot smaller than $30 billion, which is the size of Intel's Xeon business. But it's a lot larger than $1.6 billion, which was the revenue for all of AMD combined (CPUs, GPUs—the whole company) in the first quarter of 2011. Furthermore, Intel puts the size of the entire Opteron ecosystem at $2.8 billion, so Intel's Itanium revenues alone beat everyone's total revenues (AMD plus all of its OEM partners) from Opteron.'