1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:07,860 Intel keeps very careful track of its internal engineering samples going to great lengths to ensure that if 2 00:00:08,100 --> 00:00:15,120 They leave the lab it is in pieces so small that they could never be reassembled again 3 00:00:15,780 --> 00:00:18,360 So the first question we need to answer is 4 00:00:19,200 --> 00:00:22,120 How did we get our hands on? 5 00:00:22,890 --> 00:00:25,210 this thing 6 00:00:25,210 --> 00:00:28,690 eBay obviously what can't you buy on eBay a 7 00:00:28,690 --> 00:00:36,890 Sponsorship online is tech tips for that you have to talk to Colton like Corsair did Corsair's dark core se RGB wireless mouse 8 00:00:36,890 --> 00:00:42,590 Features one millisecond 2.4 gigahertz and low latency Bluetooth connectivity check it out at the link below 9 00:00:43,330 --> 00:00:59,790 So the seller turned out to have been a contractor at Intel a few years ago who in the middle of a sixth floor 10 00:01:00,250 --> 00:01:03,570 renovation went dumpster diving through the boxes full of 11 00:01:04,010 --> 00:01:07,010 Junk that was destined for the e-waste pile 12 00:01:07,090 --> 00:01:07,590 apparently 13 00:01:07,590 --> 00:01:07,790 It was a 14 00:01:07,790 --> 00:01:11,410 treasure trove of press samples laptops and 15 00:01:12,320 --> 00:01:13,760 this 16 00:01:13,760 --> 00:01:19,240 GPU looking thing that was noteworthy for being blue instead of green or red 17 00:01:20,180 --> 00:01:22,180 You see by that point 18 00:01:22,280 --> 00:01:24,340 project Larrabee this 19 00:01:25,100 --> 00:01:32,520 Sort of had been cancelled for years and how many years depends on which cancellation you're going by 20 00:01:32,600 --> 00:01:37,540 So talking to Tom Forsythe who was one of the key team members he figures 21 00:01:37,540 --> 00:01:44,140 They got cancelled anywhere from four to five times and remembers getting these weird memos 22 00:01:44,960 --> 00:01:46,200 Yeah 23 00:01:46,200 --> 00:01:48,200 You guys are gonna see some headlines 24 00:01:48,940 --> 00:01:50,660 It's just a thing 25 00:01:50,660 --> 00:01:53,620 None of you are laid off. Just keep on working 26 00:01:54,320 --> 00:01:58,300 BT dubs you've been rebranded Zeon fight. Thanks. Bye. So 27 00:01:59,320 --> 00:02:01,320 What is this thing? 28 00:02:01,600 --> 00:02:05,700 that's actually a somewhat complicated question, but 29 00:02:05,700 --> 00:02:12,080 Because it's got a DVI port not to mention DisplayPort and HDMI soldered onto it 30 00:02:12,080 --> 00:02:19,240 It is technically an engineering sample board for Intel's first and to date only 31 00:02:20,500 --> 00:02:22,500 dedicated graphics card now 32 00:02:23,020 --> 00:02:30,100 Most people who follow the mainstream tech press believe that project Larrabee was an abject failure 33 00:02:30,560 --> 00:02:34,560 But as is so often the case the truth is actually 34 00:02:34,560 --> 00:02:39,020 Stranger than fiction not only was it a success 35 00:02:39,420 --> 00:02:44,120 But it powered th2, which was the world's most powerful 36 00:02:45,040 --> 00:02:48,740 supercomputer for over two years and ten years later 37 00:02:48,860 --> 00:02:57,320 You can actually still buy its descendants either in socketed form as we reviewed just last year or on 38 00:02:57,320 --> 00:02:59,320 Amazon for a cool 39 00:02:59,520 --> 00:03:01,200 1500 greenbacks 40 00:03:01,200 --> 00:03:04,340 So as it turns out the goal of the project 41 00:03:05,140 --> 00:03:09,760 Never was actually to create a gaming GPU 42 00:03:10,180 --> 00:03:17,460 That was just a workload that was already fairly well understood at the time because you gotta remember back in the mid 43 00:03:17,800 --> 00:03:21,180 2000s the idea of using a GPU as a 44 00:03:21,920 --> 00:03:25,840 General purpose computing unit was just emerging 45 00:03:25,880 --> 00:03:34,340 so this this idea of using it for gaming was actually just a small part of a business case to build a 46 00:03:34,560 --> 00:03:38,180 processor that had many highly efficient 47 00:03:38,820 --> 00:03:41,660 x86 cores that could be easily just like 48 00:03:42,280 --> 00:03:44,980 slotted into these powerful supercomputers 49 00:03:45,920 --> 00:03:47,060 but 50 00:03:47,060 --> 00:03:55,140 That doesn't mean that it couldn't have been used for gaming in fact by the time they wound down the units that were working on 51 00:03:55,160 --> 00:03:57,160 graphics they had about 52 00:03:57,700 --> 00:04:00,460 300 of the top-selling games on Steam 53 00:04:01,320 --> 00:04:04,260 running on the thing with a card just 54 00:04:04,880 --> 00:04:12,260 like this one as the only GPU in the system and the way this whole thing worked is incredible now a 55 00:04:12,840 --> 00:04:18,920 Normal graphics card or GPU rather uses a lot of fixed function hardware 56 00:04:18,920 --> 00:04:23,140 So if you told it okay, look, I don't need shaders 57 00:04:23,140 --> 00:04:28,400 Just draw a ton of tiny lines with really nice anti-aliasing 58 00:04:28,400 --> 00:04:30,980 So that's pretty much CAD in a nutshell 59 00:04:31,540 --> 00:04:34,180 It would use only a fraction of its hardware 60 00:04:34,180 --> 00:04:36,180 But with Larrabee 61 00:04:36,940 --> 00:04:41,640 Everything is software. So the whole chip is lit up doing that 62 00:04:41,720 --> 00:04:46,360 So that actually helped to offset the x86 overhead a fair bit 63 00:04:46,360 --> 00:04:53,100 This was the fastest CAD card at the time and it had other benefits with regular GPUs 64 00:04:53,140 --> 00:04:55,280 You might run into a situation where? 65 00:04:55,940 --> 00:05:04,140 Enabling a particular feature in a game might hit the AMD users a lot harder than the NVIDIA users or vice versa 66 00:05:04,180 --> 00:05:06,180 So during development 67 00:05:06,680 --> 00:05:10,680 AMD and NVIDIA they both have to actually guess as best 68 00:05:10,680 --> 00:05:18,020 They can what the next couple of years of games will demand and then try to look into their crystal ball and build their hardware 69 00:05:18,020 --> 00:05:19,540 Around that 70 00:05:19,540 --> 00:05:24,820 Larrabee, no such limitation. This thing is a full-blown 71 00:05:25,520 --> 00:05:32,840 Computer with up to 61 quad threaded cores running a normal operating system like FreeBSD 72 00:05:32,940 --> 00:05:33,980 like you could 73 00:05:33,980 --> 00:05:36,660 you could actually telnet into the thing 74 00:05:36,660 --> 00:05:39,600 and run a top command and see a list 75 00:05:39,600 --> 00:05:41,980 of all the processes that were running on it. 76 00:05:41,980 --> 00:05:43,700 And if you were running a game, 77 00:05:43,700 --> 00:05:47,960 you'd see, I don't know, 128 or 200 processes 78 00:05:47,960 --> 00:05:50,500 called DirectX graphics. 79 00:05:50,500 --> 00:05:55,320 And you could do that while the thing was working. 80 00:05:55,320 --> 00:05:59,460 So if you wanted, you could cordon off some of the cores 81 00:05:59,460 --> 00:06:01,260 and use them for something else, 82 00:06:01,260 --> 00:06:03,940 or you could just YOLO it 83 00:06:03,940 --> 00:06:06,320 and throw another workload into the mix 84 00:06:06,320 --> 00:06:10,180 and then just let the processor manage itself. 85 00:06:10,180 --> 00:06:13,780 The only non-programmable hardware on this puppy 86 00:06:13,780 --> 00:06:18,100 is the texture unit, which takes very simple commands. 87 00:06:18,100 --> 00:06:21,080 I mean, wrap your brain around this. 88 00:06:21,080 --> 00:06:23,860 The thing that I'm looking at right here 89 00:06:23,860 --> 00:06:28,860 is Intel's first ever DirectX 11 GPU. 90 00:06:29,660 --> 00:06:31,600 Even though it was built, 91 00:06:31,600 --> 00:06:34,810 it was built before DirectX 11. 92 00:06:34,810 --> 00:06:38,810 So this was possible because all of those graphics card 93 00:06:38,810 --> 00:06:42,210 features that are normally running in hardware 94 00:06:42,210 --> 00:06:44,190 are just running in software. 95 00:06:44,190 --> 00:06:47,450 So you could actually update it to DirectX 11 96 00:06:47,450 --> 00:06:52,030 or DirectX 12 with a driver update. 97 00:06:52,030 --> 00:06:54,560 Now, there are some caveats here. 98 00:06:54,560 --> 00:06:56,220 I mean, there's a reason that the thing 99 00:06:56,220 --> 00:06:59,300 never made it into a computer near you. 100 00:06:59,300 --> 00:07:01,800 It wasn't as efficient as a dedicated graphics card, 101 00:07:01,800 --> 00:07:05,280 for a lot of things. 102 00:07:05,280 --> 00:07:08,980 So it only got about a quarter of the performance in games 103 00:07:08,980 --> 00:07:14,160 as a comparably power consuming card 104 00:07:14,160 --> 00:07:16,900 from AMD or NVIDIA at the time. 105 00:07:16,900 --> 00:07:20,840 But it was really good at certain graphics workloads 106 00:07:20,840 --> 00:07:22,160 for a number of reasons. 107 00:07:22,160 --> 00:07:25,040 And I mean, if you think about it 108 00:07:25,040 --> 00:07:27,980 and you look at how far off they were, 109 00:07:27,980 --> 00:07:32,020 considering that they were effectively emulating, 110 00:07:32,020 --> 00:07:37,020 dedicated hardware, it's damn impressive. 111 00:07:37,100 --> 00:07:41,410 So what happened? 112 00:07:41,410 --> 00:07:44,290 Well, management happened. 113 00:07:44,290 --> 00:07:48,610 Intel at its core, haha, is a hardware company. 114 00:07:48,610 --> 00:07:51,870 So they wanted all the features completed 115 00:07:51,870 --> 00:07:55,710 so they could either ship this thing or can it. 116 00:07:55,710 --> 00:07:57,370 Because in the hardware world, 117 00:07:57,370 --> 00:08:00,570 making up a four times difference in performance 118 00:08:00,570 --> 00:08:03,270 is impossible and you might as well just pull the plug. 119 00:08:03,270 --> 00:08:07,050 But the team wanted to work on performance optimization 120 00:08:07,050 --> 00:08:10,070 instead because in the software world, 121 00:08:10,070 --> 00:08:13,990 it's not unheard of to go from like two pixels 122 00:08:13,990 --> 00:08:16,710 showing up on a screen and dog slow 123 00:08:16,710 --> 00:08:19,790 to a hundred times faster in a week 124 00:08:19,790 --> 00:08:21,290 if you have a breakthrough. 125 00:08:21,290 --> 00:08:23,530 And it got to the point where they had to have 126 00:08:23,530 --> 00:08:28,530 separate teams for performance and for features 127 00:08:28,790 --> 00:08:30,730 to get management off their backs. 128 00:08:30,730 --> 00:08:33,250 So the performance team actually got Quake 129 00:08:33,270 --> 00:08:35,430 running like really fast, 130 00:08:35,430 --> 00:08:38,790 but then they found out that Quake was this weird edge case 131 00:08:38,790 --> 00:08:41,590 and the architecture would have to be completely redone. 132 00:08:41,590 --> 00:08:43,550 I mean, to give you guys some idea of the dysfunction, 133 00:08:43,550 --> 00:08:47,410 at one point there were three to four software teams 134 00:08:47,410 --> 00:08:49,410 with different ideas and working on 135 00:08:49,410 --> 00:08:51,510 different rendering architectures. 136 00:08:51,510 --> 00:08:52,990 But depending who you ask, 137 00:08:52,990 --> 00:08:55,190 the continued development would have been worth it. 138 00:08:55,190 --> 00:08:56,910 I mean, imagine this. 139 00:08:56,910 --> 00:09:01,650 Instead of turning anti-aliasing on for an entire scene, 140 00:09:01,650 --> 00:09:03,030 imagine if a game developer 141 00:09:03,030 --> 00:09:04,850 could say, well, you know what? 142 00:09:04,850 --> 00:09:08,690 This sky is not important to be anti-aliased. 143 00:09:08,690 --> 00:09:11,190 Why don't we just focus all of our AA 144 00:09:11,190 --> 00:09:15,770 on these characters here or this foliage there? 145 00:09:15,770 --> 00:09:16,950 Or how about this? 146 00:09:16,950 --> 00:09:20,850 Like, oh crap, that texture wasn't loaded. 147 00:09:20,850 --> 00:09:21,690 You know what? 148 00:09:21,690 --> 00:09:24,670 Let's just procedurally generate a placeholder. 149 00:09:24,670 --> 00:09:26,050 Boom. 150 00:09:26,050 --> 00:09:29,010 Arguably the stupidest decision that was made 151 00:09:29,010 --> 00:09:32,470 was to make the Larrabee graphics team 152 00:09:32,470 --> 00:09:35,010 and the Gen graphics team, 153 00:09:35,010 --> 00:09:36,050 which is what Intel calls 154 00:09:36,050 --> 00:09:38,550 its integrated graphics internally, 155 00:09:38,550 --> 00:09:42,250 compete together for the same budget 156 00:09:42,250 --> 00:09:45,110 and then like make internal presentations 157 00:09:45,110 --> 00:09:48,470 arguing about why their approach was good in the future 158 00:09:48,470 --> 00:09:50,790 and the other groups was bad and not the future 159 00:09:50,790 --> 00:09:53,170 because they were both perfectly suitable 160 00:09:53,170 --> 00:09:55,470 for what they were doing. 161 00:09:55,470 --> 00:09:59,350 Larrabee was never going to be a five watt part 162 00:09:59,350 --> 00:10:01,590 that you could bake right into a CPU. 163 00:10:02,470 --> 00:10:05,790 A 200 watt PCI express part 164 00:10:05,790 --> 00:10:09,300 was nowhere on the roadmap for Gen. 165 00:10:09,300 --> 00:10:12,810 So what I've got here, come on, come on, come on, 166 00:10:12,810 --> 00:10:15,650 is not Knight's Ferry. 167 00:10:15,650 --> 00:10:17,950 That was the first Larrabee revision 168 00:10:17,950 --> 00:10:20,370 that had some deal breaking bugs. 169 00:10:20,370 --> 00:10:22,950 Apparently the saying in the hardware industry is 170 00:10:22,950 --> 00:10:25,490 always plan to make a prototype 171 00:10:25,490 --> 00:10:27,790 since you'll end up making one anyway. 172 00:10:27,790 --> 00:10:30,430 So this is Knight's Corner 173 00:10:30,430 --> 00:10:33,070 and probably has anywhere from six to 16 174 00:10:33,070 --> 00:10:36,570 16 gigs of RAM and up to 62 cores, 175 00:10:36,570 --> 00:10:40,210 depending on how many of them had some manufacturing flaws. 176 00:10:40,210 --> 00:10:41,970 Should we fire it up? 177 00:10:41,970 --> 00:10:42,810 I mean, come on. 178 00:10:43,910 --> 00:10:46,470 I wasn't not gonna do that at this point. 179 00:10:46,470 --> 00:10:51,460 I spent like $400 on this thing off of eBay. 180 00:10:51,460 --> 00:10:53,620 I've got no drivers for it. 181 00:10:53,620 --> 00:10:56,180 So it's actually, this is the first time I've turned it on. 182 00:10:56,180 --> 00:10:58,720 So it is very possible that it won't manage 183 00:10:58,720 --> 00:11:01,340 to display anything even in 2D, 184 00:11:01,340 --> 00:11:03,810 but I definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, 185 00:11:03,810 --> 00:11:07,600 definitely have to try. 186 00:11:07,600 --> 00:11:09,400 By the way, if anyone out there 187 00:11:09,400 --> 00:11:12,460 has the secret sauce drivers 188 00:11:12,460 --> 00:11:14,840 or has access to the secret sauce drivers 189 00:11:14,840 --> 00:11:17,110 that would make this run games, 190 00:11:17,110 --> 00:11:21,200 please hit me up. 191 00:11:21,200 --> 00:11:23,660 I mean, assuming that it even works, 192 00:11:23,660 --> 00:11:26,930 which we don't know yet. 193 00:11:26,930 --> 00:11:28,410 I actually haven't tried this. 194 00:11:28,410 --> 00:11:31,270 I wanted to save the suspense for the video. 195 00:11:31,270 --> 00:11:33,330 This is like far more post codes 196 00:11:33,330 --> 00:11:36,540 than I'm accustomed to seeing, 197 00:11:36,540 --> 00:11:38,040 but it hasn't stopped. 198 00:11:38,040 --> 00:11:39,980 And it hasn't rebooted. 199 00:11:39,980 --> 00:11:45,650 We've got some kind of LED on here. 200 00:11:47,640 --> 00:11:49,400 It looks like it stalled on D6, 201 00:11:49,400 --> 00:11:51,560 but I don't know what that is. 202 00:11:51,560 --> 00:11:52,920 Now, when I talked to Tom, 203 00:11:52,920 --> 00:11:56,680 he did specifically mention it's got DVI soldered to it. 204 00:11:56,680 --> 00:11:58,340 Now, I don't know if that's because DVI 205 00:11:58,340 --> 00:12:01,780 was the most relevant output at the time. 206 00:12:01,780 --> 00:12:03,680 So that's like what they used internally, 207 00:12:03,680 --> 00:12:06,960 or if the DisplayPort and HDMI were just dummies 208 00:12:06,960 --> 00:12:08,980 and DVI was the only thing that actually worked. 209 00:12:08,980 --> 00:12:13,320 So, take two, I'm gonna run and grab a DVI monitor 210 00:12:13,320 --> 00:12:14,600 and gonna try this again. 211 00:12:14,600 --> 00:12:17,120 Like, I kind of wonder about, 212 00:12:17,120 --> 00:12:19,600 you know, what it's PCI-e. 213 00:12:19,600 --> 00:12:25,780 I mean, would that be even Gen 2 at that point? 214 00:12:25,780 --> 00:12:33,200 Like 2007, 2009. 215 00:12:33,200 --> 00:12:34,460 I wonder about compatibility 216 00:12:34,460 --> 00:12:38,180 with the new board and stuff like that. 217 00:12:38,180 --> 00:12:39,000 You know what? 218 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:41,940 I don't think it's gonna boot. 219 00:12:41,940 --> 00:12:44,520 Well, that's pretty disappointing. 220 00:12:44,520 --> 00:12:45,740 I thought I might be onto something 221 00:12:45,740 --> 00:12:46,940 with the whole DVI thing. 222 00:12:46,940 --> 00:12:51,190 I'm just gonna try, I'm gonna try one other slot 223 00:12:51,190 --> 00:12:56,680 just to, I think there's only one other one 224 00:12:56,680 --> 00:12:59,260 out in the wild and some like Russian collector 225 00:12:59,260 --> 00:13:00,980 of like weird hardware has it. 226 00:13:00,980 --> 00:13:03,980 Yeah, not you, a different one. 227 00:13:04,980 --> 00:13:07,660 Okay, sometimes it hangs on 79 for a bit 228 00:13:07,660 --> 00:13:09,380 and then this thing boots. 229 00:13:09,380 --> 00:13:12,180 So that might've been a good sign. 230 00:13:12,180 --> 00:13:13,620 No, that's D6 again. 231 00:13:13,620 --> 00:13:16,830 I think it's not going anywhere. 232 00:13:16,830 --> 00:13:18,670 Well, that was disappointing, 233 00:13:18,670 --> 00:13:21,670 but I'm gonna let it keep trying 234 00:13:21,670 --> 00:13:26,500 while I tell you guys about Mastrop. 235 00:13:26,500 --> 00:13:28,640 I'm like sad, it's like hard to have any energy. 236 00:13:28,640 --> 00:13:31,240 Okay, I'm gonna try that again. 237 00:13:31,240 --> 00:13:33,680 Mastrop, Mastrop is featuring 238 00:13:33,680 --> 00:13:37,320 the Sennheiser PC37X gaming headset. 239 00:13:37,320 --> 00:13:39,640 They've got angled drivers and an open back design 240 00:13:39,640 --> 00:13:41,780 and the drivers actually come from the same family 241 00:13:41,780 --> 00:13:45,380 as the HD598 and HD600 headphones. 242 00:13:45,380 --> 00:13:49,000 They offer superior stereo imaging and locational accuracy 243 00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:50,700 and come with a noise canceling microphone. 244 00:13:50,700 --> 00:13:53,980 They're available on Mastrop at the link below 245 00:13:53,980 --> 00:13:57,520 for a limited time for just 120 US dollars. 246 00:13:57,520 --> 00:13:59,490 So go check them out. 247 00:13:59,490 --> 00:14:00,770 So thanks for watching guys. 248 00:14:00,770 --> 00:14:03,310 If this video sucked, you know what to do, 249 00:14:03,310 --> 00:14:07,530 but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button. 250 00:14:07,530 --> 00:14:08,910 You can especially hit that like button 251 00:14:08,910 --> 00:14:10,030 if you wanna make me feel better 252 00:14:10,030 --> 00:14:12,790 about how disappointed I feel right now, 253 00:14:12,790 --> 00:14:14,750 or you can check out the link to where to buy the stuff 254 00:14:14,750 --> 00:14:17,370 we featured in the video description. 255 00:14:17,370 --> 00:14:19,410 Also linked in the description is our merch store, 256 00:14:19,410 --> 00:14:20,770 which has cool shirts like this one 257 00:14:20,770 --> 00:14:26,320 and our community forum, which you should totally join. 258 00:14:26,320 --> 00:14:29,100 Oh, I really, I was really hoping 259 00:14:29,100 --> 00:14:31,020 I was just gonna get the screen to light up. 260 00:14:31,020 --> 00:14:39,890 That was all I was really, that was all I really wanted. 261 00:14:39,890 --> 00:14:42,180 Good night, sweet prince. 262 00:14:42,180 --> 00:14:43,780 You were too good for this world.