Intel Abandons Discrete Graphics

Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq: "Paul Otellini may think there's still life in Intel's Larrabee discrete graphics project, but the other guys at Intel don't appear to share his optimism. Intel's director of product and technology media relations, Bill Kircos, has just written a blog about Intel's graphics strategy, revealing that any plans for a discrete graphics card have been shelved for at least the foreseeable future. 'We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market,' stated Kircos, 'at least in the short-term.' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product, and said that the company's graphics division is now 'focused on processor graphics.'"

missed milestones

[LinuxIsGarbage]

' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product,

Like proof that they were even capable of making an integrated graphics product that wasn't a pile of garbage?

GMA910: Couldn't run WDDM, thus couldn't run Aero, central to the "Vista capable" Lawsuits

GMA500: decent hardware, crappy drivers under Windows, virtually non-existant Linux drivers, worse performance than GMA950 in Netbooks.

Pressure to lockout competing video chipsets. We're lucky ION saw the light of day. http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,680035/Nvidia-versus-Intel-Nvidia-files-lawsuit-against-Intel/News/ [pcgameshardware.com]

Mod parent "Likely."

[Spazntwich]

Short of buying out Nvidia I don't see Intel having a consumer's chance in America of competing with AMD in the value sector for the next few generations of chips.

CPUs have been "fast enough" for years, but GPUs have not. AMD is going to laugh all the way to the bank being able to offer a $50 package that can run The Sims.

Re:Groan

[Pojut]

For anyone stuck with an Intel GMA chipset: GMA Booster [gmabooster.com] may help solve some of your problems. Just make sure you have a decent cooling solution [newegg.com], as it can ramp up the heat output of your system considerably. Still, if you're stuck with GMA, it can make the difference between a game being unplayable and being smooth.

Re:Wait, what? This is news?

[kdekorte]

The i740 [wikipedia.org] card.... great expections, poor real world experience.

Re:Mod parent "Likely."

[Korin43]

As long as you've got decent compositing speed and pixel shaders for a few GUI effects, pretty much any ATI or nVidia GPU from the last few years is fast enough for a typical user.

Fixed that for you. Intel cards are fine for "normal" computer usage, but they still suck pretty bad at most games.

A discrete component

[tepples]

More directly, what the hell is "discrete graphics"?

It refers to a graphics processor as a separate (discrete) component of a computer system. A chip that does nothing but graphics can be more powerful than integrated graphics because the GPU circuitry doesn't have to share a die with the rest of the northbridge.

Re:Wait, what? This is news?

[TheRaven64]

To be fair to Intel, most graphics cards then were on the PCI bus, not AGP, so they didn't have the opportunity to use the host RAM except via a very slow mechanism. At the time, the amount of RAM was far more of a limitation than the speed, and a card using 8MB of host RAM via AGP was likely to have an advantage over a card with 4MB of local RAM on the PCI bus. While it was much slower than competing solutions, it was also much cheaper. The RAM on something like the VooDoo 2 was a significant proportion of the cost. A 740 cost about 20% of a VooDoo 2 and using system RAM had the advantage that you didn't have a load of RAM doing nothing while you were not doing 3D stuff. At the time the 740 was introduced, I had an 8MB VooDoo 2 and only 32MB of main memory. Having 8MB of RAM sitting doing nothing during the 90% of the time that I wasn't playing 3D games was a massive waste.

Re:I wonder

[TheRaven64]

It's not a new term, and it's not unique to GPUs. The distinction between integrated and discrete coprocessors has been around for at least 25 years. If you read something like Byte from the early '90s, you will find discussions about the relative merits of integrated and discrete FPUs. You'll find a similar discussion on integrated and discrete MMUs and various other components if you look a few years earlier.

Limited to 950

[manekineko2]

Note for anyone else whose curiosity was piqued, this only works with 32bit systems with 950 chipset based systems, and does not work with GMA X3100, GMA X4500, GMA 500, or GMA 900.

Re:Not really

[quanticle]

Their intended purpose is to be cheap solutions for basic video, including things like Aero.

Well, it depends on your definition of basic video, of course. I mean, I've seen Intel GMA chipsets struggle to display a 1080p Blu-Ray movie. Given that consumers increasingly are going to be hooking up their laptops to TVs and other larger displays, saying, "Oh, that's not basic video," isn't going to cut it.

Re:Both good and bad

[FreonTrip]

VIA stopped designing motherboards for AMD and Intel CPUs about two years ago. Consequently, you can't find its GPUs in many places aside from embedded systems or ultra low-budget netbooks and the like. Weirdly they still sell a miniscule number of discrete cards, primarily overseas, but without divine intervention they'll never become a serious player again.

Matrox serves niche markets, mostly in the way of professional workstations, medical imaging equipment, and the odd sale of their TripleHead system to the ever-eroding hardcore PC gamer market.

In case anyone wonders what happened to the others: Oak Technologies' graphics division was acquired by ATI many moons ago; Rendition was eaten by Micron in 1998 and their name is now used to sell budget RAM; SiS bought Trident's graphics division, spun off their graphical company as XGI Technologies, had a series of disastrous product releases, and had their foundries bought by ATI, who let them continue to sell their unremarkable products to eager low-bidders; and 3dfx was mismanaged into oblivion a decade ago.