Intel keeps very careful track of its internal engineering samples going to great lengths to ensure that if
They leave the lab it is in pieces so small that they could never be reassembled again
So the first question we need to answer is
How did we get our hands on?
this thing
eBay obviously what can't you buy on eBay a
Sponsorship online is tech tips for that you have to talk to Colton like Corsair did Corsair's dark core se RGB wireless mouse
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So the seller turned out to have been a contractor at Intel a few years ago who in the middle of a sixth floor
renovation went dumpster diving through the boxes full of
Junk that was destined for the e-waste pile
apparently
It was a
treasure trove of press samples laptops and
this
GPU looking thing that was noteworthy for being blue instead of green or red
You see by that point
project Larrabee this
Sort of had been cancelled for years and how many years depends on which cancellation you're going by
So talking to Tom Forsythe who was one of the key team members he figures
They got cancelled anywhere from four to five times and remembers getting these weird memos
Yeah
You guys are gonna see some headlines
It's just a thing
None of you are laid off. Just keep on working
BT dubs you've been rebranded Zeon fight. Thanks. Bye. So
What is this thing?
that's actually a somewhat complicated question, but
Because it's got a DVI port not to mention DisplayPort and HDMI soldered onto it
It is technically an engineering sample board for Intel's first and to date only
dedicated graphics card now
Most people who follow the mainstream tech press believe that project Larrabee was an abject failure
But as is so often the case the truth is actually
Stranger than fiction not only was it a success
But it powered th2, which was the world's most powerful
supercomputer for over two years and ten years later
You can actually still buy its descendants either in socketed form as we reviewed just last year or on
Amazon for a cool
1500 greenbacks
So as it turns out the goal of the project
Never was actually to create a gaming GPU
That was just a workload that was already fairly well understood at the time because you gotta remember back in the mid
2000s the idea of using a GPU as a
General purpose computing unit was just emerging
so this this idea of using it for gaming was actually just a small part of a business case to build a
processor that had many highly efficient
x86 cores that could be easily just like
slotted into these powerful supercomputers
but
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
graphics they had about
300 of the top-selling games on Steam
running on the thing with a card just
like this one as the only GPU in the system and the way this whole thing worked is incredible now a
Normal graphics card or GPU rather uses a lot of fixed function hardware
So if you told it okay, look, I don't need shaders
Just draw a ton of tiny lines with really nice anti-aliasing
So that's pretty much CAD in a nutshell
It would use only a fraction of its hardware
But with Larrabee
Everything is software. So the whole chip is lit up doing that
So that actually helped to offset the x86 overhead a fair bit
This was the fastest CAD card at the time and it had other benefits with regular GPUs
You might run into a situation where?
Enabling a particular feature in a game might hit the AMD users a lot harder than the NVIDIA users or vice versa
So during development
AMD and NVIDIA they both have to actually guess as best
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
Around that
Larrabee, no such limitation. This thing is a full-blown
Computer with up to 61 quad threaded cores running a normal operating system like FreeBSD
like you could
you could actually telnet into the thing
and run a top command and see a list
of all the processes that were running on it.
And if you were running a game,
you'd see, I don't know, 128 or 200 processes
called DirectX graphics.
And you could do that while the thing was working.
So if you wanted, you could cordon off some of the cores
and use them for something else,
or you could just YOLO it
and throw another workload into the mix
and then just let the processor manage itself.
The only non-programmable hardware on this puppy
is the texture unit, which takes very simple commands.
I mean, wrap your brain around this.
The thing that I'm looking at right here
is Intel's first ever DirectX 11 GPU.
Even though it was built,
it was built before DirectX 11.
So this was possible because all of those graphics card
features that are normally running in hardware
are just running in software.
So you could actually update it to DirectX 11
or DirectX 12 with a driver update.
Now, there are some caveats here.
I mean, there's a reason that the thing
never made it into a computer near you.
It wasn't as efficient as a dedicated graphics card,
for a lot of things.
So it only got about a quarter of the performance in games
as a comparably power consuming card
from AMD or NVIDIA at the time.
But it was really good at certain graphics workloads
for a number of reasons.
And I mean, if you think about it
and you look at how far off they were,
considering that they were effectively emulating,
dedicated hardware, it's damn impressive.
So what happened?
Well, management happened.
Intel at its core, haha, is a hardware company.
So they wanted all the features completed
so they could either ship this thing or can it.
Because in the hardware world,
making up a four times difference in performance
is impossible and you might as well just pull the plug.
But the team wanted to work on performance optimization
instead because in the software world,
it's not unheard of to go from like two pixels
showing up on a screen and dog slow
to a hundred times faster in a week
if you have a breakthrough.
And it got to the point where they had to have
separate teams for performance and for features
to get management off their backs.
So the performance team actually got Quake
running like really fast,
but then they found out that Quake was this weird edge case
and the architecture would have to be completely redone.
I mean, to give you guys some idea of the dysfunction,
at one point there were three to four software teams
with different ideas and working on
different rendering architectures.
But depending who you ask,
the continued development would have been worth it.
I mean, imagine this.
Instead of turning anti-aliasing on for an entire scene,
imagine if a game developer
could say, well, you know what?
This sky is not important to be anti-aliased.
Why don't we just focus all of our AA
on these characters here or this foliage there?
Or how about this?
Like, oh crap, that texture wasn't loaded.
You know what?
Let's just procedurally generate a placeholder.
Boom.
Arguably the stupidest decision that was made
was to make the Larrabee graphics team
and the Gen graphics team,
which is what Intel calls
its integrated graphics internally,
compete together for the same budget
and then like make internal presentations
arguing about why their approach was good in the future
and the other groups was bad and not the future
because they were both perfectly suitable
for what they were doing.
Larrabee was never going to be a five watt part
that you could bake right into a CPU.
A 200 watt PCI express part
was nowhere on the roadmap for Gen.
So what I've got here, come on, come on, come on,
is not Knight's Ferry.
That was the first Larrabee revision
that had some deal breaking bugs.
Apparently the saying in the hardware industry is
always plan to make a prototype
since you'll end up making one anyway.
So this is Knight's Corner
and probably has anywhere from six to 16
16 gigs of RAM and up to 62 cores,
depending on how many of them had some manufacturing flaws.
Should we fire it up?
I mean, come on.
I wasn't not gonna do that at this point.
I spent like $400 on this thing off of eBay.
I've got no drivers for it.
So it's actually, this is the first time I've turned it on.
So it is very possible that it won't manage
to display anything even in 2D,
but I definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely,
definitely have to try.
By the way, if anyone out there
has the secret sauce drivers
or has access to the secret sauce drivers
that would make this run games,
please hit me up.
I mean, assuming that it even works,
which we don't know yet.
I actually haven't tried this.
I wanted to save the suspense for the video.
This is like far more post codes
than I'm accustomed to seeing,
but it hasn't stopped.
And it hasn't rebooted.
We've got some kind of LED on here.
It looks like it stalled on D6,
but I don't know what that is.
Now, when I talked to Tom,
he did specifically mention it's got DVI soldered to it.
Now, I don't know if that's because DVI
was the most relevant output at the time.
So that's like what they used internally,
or if the DisplayPort and HDMI were just dummies
and DVI was the only thing that actually worked.
So, take two, I'm gonna run and grab a DVI monitor
and gonna try this again.
Like, I kind of wonder about,
you know, what it's PCI-e.
I mean, would that be even Gen 2 at that point?
Like 2007, 2009.
I wonder about compatibility
with the new board and stuff like that.
You know what?
I don't think it's gonna boot.
Well, that's pretty disappointing.
I thought I might be onto something
with the whole DVI thing.
I'm just gonna try, I'm gonna try one other slot
just to, I think there's only one other one
out in the wild and some like Russian collector
of like weird hardware has it.
Yeah, not you, a different one.
Okay, sometimes it hangs on 79 for a bit
and then this thing boots.
So that might've been a good sign.
No, that's D6 again.
I think it's not going anywhere.
Well, that was disappointing,
but I'm gonna let it keep trying
while I tell you guys about Mastrop.
I'm like sad, it's like hard to have any energy.
Okay, I'm gonna try that again.
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So go check them out.
So thanks for watching guys.
If this video sucked, you know what to do,
but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button.
You can especially hit that like button
if you wanna make me feel better
about how disappointed I feel right now,
or you can check out the link to where to buy the stuff
we featured in the video description.
Also linked in the description is our merch store,
which has cool shirts like this one
and our community forum, which you should totally join.
Oh, I really, I was really hoping
I was just gonna get the screen to light up.
That was all I was really, that was all I really wanted.
Good night, sweet prince.
You were too good for this world.