Intel Larrabee 2

erek

erek

[H]F Junkie
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Someone in China has located a supposed Intel Larrabee 2 card. It's presented next to my old Larrabee

https://twitter.com/yjfycom/status/1605207230361800704


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Red Falcon

FkbW6EdagAEUhx9?format=jpg&name=large.jpg


http://www.yjfy.com/collection/collection-0044.htm

2.1.2.2 Larrabee2 Graphics card

On August 15, 2016, Tom Forsyth of the original Larrabee development team revealed in "Why Didn't Larrabee Fail?":

Remember - KNC is literally the same chip as LRB2. It has texture samplers and a video out port sitting on the die. They don't test them or turn them on or expose them to software, but they're still there - it's still a graphics-capable part.

The author is fortunate to have collected a Larrabee2 Graphics card, which confirms what Tom Forsyth said is true.







The PCB date is 3611 weeks, the GPU date is 1147 weeks, and the card number *124711*. Serial#IWCH14900041. 4GB GDDR5 memory, HYNIX H5GQ2H24MFR.





This Larrabee2 Graphics card is actually Knights Corner's Chip evaluation board, which is equipped with a DVI interface. It couldn't be displayed when I tested it on the computer. There are several sets of jumpers on the board. I am afraid that only Tom Forsyth can make it a Larrabee2 Graphics card.

 
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erek said:
Someone in China has located a supposed Intel Larrabee 2 card. It's presented next to my old Larrabee

https://twitter.com/yjfycom/status/1605207230361800704


---
Red Falcon

View attachment 535978

http://www.yjfy.com/collection/collection-0044.htm

2.1.2.2 Larrabee2 Graphics card

On August 15, 2016, Tom Forsyth of the original Larrabee development team revealed in "Why Didn't Larrabee Fail?":

Remember - KNC is literally the same chip as LRB2. It has texture samplers and a video out port sitting on the die. They don't test them or turn them on or expose them to software, but they're still there - it's still a graphics-capable part.

The author is fortunate to have collected a Larrabee2 Graphics card, which confirms what Tom Forsyth said is true.





The PCB date is 3611 weeks, the GPU date is 1147 weeks, and the card number *124711*. Serial#IWCH14900041. 4GB GDDR5 memory, HYNIX H5GQ2H24MFR.



This Larrabee2 Graphics card is actually Knights Corner's Chip evaluation board, which is equipped with a DVI interface. It couldn't be displayed when I tested it on the computer. There are several sets of jumpers on the board. I am afraid that only Tom Forsyth can make it a Larrabee2 Graphics card.
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Awesome find and an excellent read, thank you erek! (y)
Very interesting design, if only we could get our hands on the drivers and/or the models that have the firmware to run with the basic Windows display drivers.

FkbW0b1acAApO33?format=jpg&name=large.jpg
 
Its weird how much the Larabee core resembles an LGA1567 Xeon, it always catches me off-guard when I see a PCB image.

Neat find! I love the GPU archaeology.
 
Seen something similar on LTT some time ago, don't remember if they got it working or not

 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Yeah, I remember them snaking that card away from him. I still think it's complete horseshit, and one of the reasons I still soft-boycott LTT to this day.
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At least you have a legitimate reason lol. I just hate how they run their show and I can't stand Linus.
 
Thank you for mentioning that erek, I sure hope Linus and his staff were able to do more with that Larrabee GPU than what they did in the original video in 2018.
I hate to go all Brotherhood of Steel, but technology like this really does belong in the hands of computer historians, retro enthusiasts, and technology archaeologists like erek, not YouTube "tech personalities" like Linus.

To be fair the original seller of the Larrabee GPU did contact me promptly, refunded me immediately, and did apologize.
I think the original seller knew they were going to get in potential legal hot water if they sold it officially through ebay, so they decided to sell it to Linus under the table (not through ebay) since he and his business are located in Canada.

If I ever see another Larrabee on sale through ebay, or anywhere else, I am going to return the favour and let erek know first. (y)
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Yeah, I remember them snaking that card away from him. I still think it's complete horseshit, and one of the reasons I still soft-boycott LTT to this day.
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LTT used to be the HWUB of 2010s. Money and fame just changed them forever.
 
Red Falcon said:
Thank you for mentioning that erek, I sure hope Linus and his staff were able to do more with that Larrabee GPU than what they did in the original video in 2018.
I hate to go all Brotherhood of Steel, but technology like this really does belong in the hands of computer historians, retro enthusiasts, and technology archaeologists like erek, not YouTube "tech personalities" like Linus.

To be fair the original seller of the Larrabee GPU did contact me promptly, refunded me immediately, and did apologize.
I think the original seller knew they were going to get in potential legal hot water if they sold it officially through ebay, so they decided to sell it to Linus under the table (not through ebay) since he and his business are located in Canada.

If I ever see another Larrabee on sale through ebay, or anywhere else, I am going to return the favour and let erek know first. (y)
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I don’t believe much of an update ever happened but we did get to see other enthusiasts locate 2 Larrabees that act as video cards
1.)

2.) https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/ylatqu/got_the_intel_larrabee_working/


This is how little he cared,

1671734869662.png
 
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erek said:
I don’t believe much of an update ever happened but we did get to see other enthusiasts locate 2 Larrabees that act as video cards
1.)
Click to expand...

Wow, if only there were a way we could get our hands on the original drivers.
That is quite the find, and accomplishment.

erek said:
2.) https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/ylatqu/got_the_intel_larrabee_working/


This is how little he cared,

View attachment 536407
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What a joke - everyone in the comments is like "Hopefully he will see this!!!", as though Linus would ever care... unless he could make money from their hard work and discoveries then claim it all as his own.
Doubling down on my Brotherhood of Steel statement. :borg:
 
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erek said:
I don’t believe much of an update ever happened but we did get to see other enthusiasts locate 2 Larrabees that act as video cards
1.)

2.) https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/ylatqu/got_the_intel_larrabee_working/


This is how little he cared,

View attachment 536407
Click to expand...


Linus is a giant dong, and has been for a very long time. He went from a cringey clickbait tech reviewer to a cringey tool tech company owner. Once he got rich, he completely lost touch with reality. The only thing really holding his empire together are the people under him who somehow can stand working with him every day of the week. You can see in many of the videos that he's not even in touch with his own employees and acts demeaning and dismissive of them. He often says and does extremely offensive things to them and gets defensive when people call him out on his BS.

He doesn't know anything about tech anymore, and basically just acts as the poster manchild face of LMG.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Linus is a giant dong, and has been for a very long time. He went from a cringey clickbait tech reviewer to a cringey tool tech company owner. Once he got rich, he completely lost touch with reality. The only thing really holding his empire together are the people under him who somehow can stand working with him every day of the week. You can see in many of the videos that he's not even in touch with his own employees and acts demeaning and dismissive of them. He often says and does extremely offensive things to them and gets defensive when people call him out on his BS.

He doesn't know anything about tech anymore, and basically just acts as the poster manchild face of LMG.
Click to expand...

I used to feel the same way about him, but I came to realize that I'm mostly just jealous of his wealth and influence.
 
ZodaEX said:
I used to feel the same way about him, but I came to realize that I'm mostly just jealous of his wealth and influence.
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Which in my humble opinion, people like him have no business having the position of being a wealthy, successful "influencer," but here we are, and there he is, wielding the mic. Buttplugs like that always seem to end up in positions of such influence or power a lot more than they should. The reasonable, voices in the tech reporting field like Kyle here at [H]ard, Thomast Pabst at Tom's Hardware, and even Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech or Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective have all since gone on to other things for their own reasons. Now you have people like Linus surrounded by spineless or scared yes men. Thankfully, you still have good places like Level1Techs, Games Nexus, and KitGuru carrying on the torch. Even though they've become much more diversified than just PC or server components these days, TechTechPotato with the current AnandTech Editor-in-chief Dr. Ian Cutress is great for the deep dives on cool stuff. So it's not like there's a vacuum of good reporting in tech anymore, you just have to trawl a bit more for it than you used to. And let's not forget Digital Foundry... :)
 
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ZodaEX said:
I used to feel the same way about him, but I came to realize that I'm mostly just jealous of his wealth and influence.
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I'm not jealous of him at all, just calling it like I see it. It doesn't matter how much money someone has or doesn't have, they can be a dong nonetheless.

I've met and know several very wealthy people that didn't let the wealth corrupt them to the core, they maintained their humility realistic world views.
 
johnnysd said:
I sometimes wonder if someone will try the Larabee approach again some time. It had a lot of promise.
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I highly doubt it. Larrabee used an array of in-order somewhere inbetween P55C and P6 (That's Pentium MMX or Pentium Pro for you youngsters) level-complexity x86-64 cores and lots of L3 cache with the rasterizer being written entirely in software. The biggest problem with this approach was performance. This was around the GTX 2x0/2x5 series days and the rumor mill was saying that performance in very simple level graphics (think pre DX9.0c level) was less than the previous generation flagship, the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Significantly less, at least, so went the rumor mill. Software renderers will always be slower than doing it in silicon - this is the problem that Larrabee faced, and at that time process nodes weren't advanced enough to cram enough cores onto the die to get adequate performance. And unless Intel suddenly develops a 3-4 process node advantage (with them being so far behind, they won't) such a product will always lose. The one advantage it did have was that the renderer could be updated to support newer DX versions with a simple software update, something that cannot be done in silicon unless the hardware support for the new featureset is already there...

One thing that Larrabee could do was order independent transparencies (which was something GPUs at the time most definitely could not do) and even a purely raycasting renderer - of course that brought its own massive set of challenges at the time before the current approach of hybrid raster/pathtracing was settled on solved these issues (Google it, I'm getting hand cramps).
 
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