WEBVTT 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 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 00:00:15.780 --> 00:00:18.360 So the first question we need to answer is 00:00:19.200 --> 00:00:22.120 How did we get our hands on? 00:00:22.890 --> 00:00:25.210 this thing 00:00:25.210 --> 00:00:28.690 eBay obviously what can't you buy on eBay a 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 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 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 00:01:00.250 --> 00:01:03.570 renovation went dumpster diving through the boxes full of 00:01:04.010 --> 00:01:07.010 Junk that was destined for the e-waste pile 00:01:07.090 --> 00:01:07.590 apparently 00:01:07.590 --> 00:01:07.790 It was a 00:01:07.790 --> 00:01:11.410 treasure trove of press samples laptops and 00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:13.760 this 00:01:13.760 --> 00:01:19.240 GPU looking thing that was noteworthy for being blue instead of green or red 00:01:20.180 --> 00:01:22.180 You see by that point 00:01:22.280 --> 00:01:24.340 project Larrabee this 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 00:01:32.600 --> 00:01:37.540 So talking to Tom Forsythe who was one of the key team members he figures 00:01:37.540 --> 00:01:44.140 They got cancelled anywhere from four to five times and remembers getting these weird memos 00:01:44.960 --> 00:01:46.200 Yeah 00:01:46.200 --> 00:01:48.200 You guys are gonna see some headlines 00:01:48.940 --> 00:01:50.660 It's just a thing 00:01:50.660 --> 00:01:53.620 None of you are laid off. Just keep on working 00:01:54.320 --> 00:01:58.300 BT dubs you've been rebranded Zeon fight. Thanks. Bye. So 00:01:59.320 --> 00:02:01.320 What is this thing? 00:02:01.600 --> 00:02:05.700 that's actually a somewhat complicated question, but 00:02:05.700 --> 00:02:12.080 Because it's got a DVI port not to mention DisplayPort and HDMI soldered onto it 00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:19.240 It is technically an engineering sample board for Intel's first and to date only 00:02:20.500 --> 00:02:22.500 dedicated graphics card now 00:02:23.020 --> 00:02:30.100 Most people who follow the mainstream tech press believe that project Larrabee was an abject failure 00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:34.560 But as is so often the case the truth is actually 00:02:34.560 --> 00:02:39.020 Stranger than fiction not only was it a success 00:02:39.420 --> 00:02:44.120 But it powered th2, which was the world's most powerful 00:02:45.040 --> 00:02:48.740 supercomputer for over two years and ten years later 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 00:02:57.320 --> 00:02:59.320 Amazon for a cool 00:02:59.520 --> 00:03:01.200 1500 greenbacks 00:03:01.200 --> 00:03:04.340 So as it turns out the goal of the project 00:03:05.140 --> 00:03:09.760 Never was actually to create a gaming GPU 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 00:03:17.800 --> 00:03:21.180 2000s the idea of using a GPU as a 00:03:21.920 --> 00:03:25.840 General purpose computing unit was just emerging 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 00:03:34.560 --> 00:03:38.180 processor that had many highly efficient 00:03:38.820 --> 00:03:41.660 x86 cores that could be easily just like 00:03:42.280 --> 00:03:44.980 slotted into these powerful supercomputers 00:03:45.920 --> 00:03:47.060 but 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 00:03:55.160 --> 00:03:57.160 graphics they had about 00:03:57.700 --> 00:04:00.460 300 of the top-selling games on Steam 00:04:01.320 --> 00:04:04.260 running on the thing with a card just 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 00:04:12.840 --> 00:04:18.920 Normal graphics card or GPU rather uses a lot of fixed function hardware 00:04:18.920 --> 00:04:23.140 So if you told it okay, look, I don't need shaders 00:04:23.140 --> 00:04:28.400 Just draw a ton of tiny lines with really nice anti-aliasing 00:04:28.400 --> 00:04:30.980 So that's pretty much CAD in a nutshell 00:04:31.540 --> 00:04:34.180 It would use only a fraction of its hardware 00:04:34.180 --> 00:04:36.180 But with Larrabee 00:04:36.940 --> 00:04:41.640 Everything is software. So the whole chip is lit up doing that 00:04:41.720 --> 00:04:46.360 So that actually helped to offset the x86 overhead a fair bit 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 00:04:53.140 --> 00:04:55.280 You might run into a situation where? 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 00:05:04.180 --> 00:05:06.180 So during development 00:05:06.680 --> 00:05:10.680 AMD and NVIDIA they both have to actually guess as best 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 00:05:18.020 --> 00:05:19.540 Around that 00:05:19.540 --> 00:05:24.820 Larrabee, no such limitation. This thing is a full-blown 00:05:25.520 --> 00:05:32.840 Computer with up to 61 quad threaded cores running a normal operating system like FreeBSD 00:05:32.940 --> 00:05:33.980 like you could 00:05:33.980 --> 00:05:36.660 you could actually telnet into the thing 00:05:36.660 --> 00:05:39.600 and run a top command and see a list 00:05:39.600 --> 00:05:41.980 of all the processes that were running on it. 00:05:41.980 --> 00:05:43.700 And if you were running a game, 00:05:43.700 --> 00:05:47.960 you'd see, I don't know, 128 or 200 processes 00:05:47.960 --> 00:05:50.500 called DirectX graphics. 00:05:50.500 --> 00:05:55.320 And you could do that while the thing was working. 00:05:55.320 --> 00:05:59.460 So if you wanted, you could cordon off some of the cores 00:05:59.460 --> 00:06:01.260 and use them for something else, 00:06:01.260 --> 00:06:03.940 or you could just YOLO it 00:06:03.940 --> 00:06:06.320 and throw another workload into the mix 00:06:06.320 --> 00:06:10.180 and then just let the processor manage itself. 00:06:10.180 --> 00:06:13.780 The only non-programmable hardware on this puppy 00:06:13.780 --> 00:06:18.100 is the texture unit, which takes very simple commands. 00:06:18.100 --> 00:06:21.080 I mean, wrap your brain around this. 00:06:21.080 --> 00:06:23.860 The thing that I'm looking at right here 00:06:23.860 --> 00:06:28.860 is Intel's first ever DirectX 11 GPU. 00:06:29.660 --> 00:06:31.600 Even though it was built, 00:06:31.600 --> 00:06:34.810 it was built before DirectX 11. 00:06:34.810 --> 00:06:38.810 So this was possible because all of those graphics card 00:06:38.810 --> 00:06:42.210 features that are normally running in hardware 00:06:42.210 --> 00:06:44.190 are just running in software. 00:06:44.190 --> 00:06:47.450 So you could actually update it to DirectX 11 00:06:47.450 --> 00:06:52.030 or DirectX 12 with a driver update. 00:06:52.030 --> 00:06:54.560 Now, there are some caveats here. 00:06:54.560 --> 00:06:56.220 I mean, there's a reason that the thing 00:06:56.220 --> 00:06:59.300 never made it into a computer near you. 00:06:59.300 --> 00:07:01.800 It wasn't as efficient as a dedicated graphics card, 00:07:01.800 --> 00:07:05.280 for a lot of things. 00:07:05.280 --> 00:07:08.980 So it only got about a quarter of the performance in games 00:07:08.980 --> 00:07:14.160 as a comparably power consuming card 00:07:14.160 --> 00:07:16.900 from AMD or NVIDIA at the time. 00:07:16.900 --> 00:07:20.840 But it was really good at certain graphics workloads 00:07:20.840 --> 00:07:22.160 for a number of reasons. 00:07:22.160 --> 00:07:25.040 And I mean, if you think about it 00:07:25.040 --> 00:07:27.980 and you look at how far off they were, 00:07:27.980 --> 00:07:32.020 considering that they were effectively emulating, 00:07:32.020 --> 00:07:37.020 dedicated hardware, it's damn impressive. 00:07:37.100 --> 00:07:41.410 So what happened? 00:07:41.410 --> 00:07:44.290 Well, management happened. 00:07:44.290 --> 00:07:48.610 Intel at its core, haha, is a hardware company. 00:07:48.610 --> 00:07:51.870 So they wanted all the features completed 00:07:51.870 --> 00:07:55.710 so they could either ship this thing or can it. 00:07:55.710 --> 00:07:57.370 Because in the hardware world, 00:07:57.370 --> 00:08:00.570 making up a four times difference in performance 00:08:00.570 --> 00:08:03.270 is impossible and you might as well just pull the plug. 00:08:03.270 --> 00:08:07.050 But the team wanted to work on performance optimization 00:08:07.050 --> 00:08:10.070 instead because in the software world, 00:08:10.070 --> 00:08:13.990 it's not unheard of to go from like two pixels 00:08:13.990 --> 00:08:16.710 showing up on a screen and dog slow 00:08:16.710 --> 00:08:19.790 to a hundred times faster in a week 00:08:19.790 --> 00:08:21.290 if you have a breakthrough. 00:08:21.290 --> 00:08:23.530 And it got to the point where they had to have 00:08:23.530 --> 00:08:28.530 separate teams for performance and for features 00:08:28.790 --> 00:08:30.730 to get management off their backs. 00:08:30.730 --> 00:08:33.250 So the performance team actually got Quake 00:08:33.270 --> 00:08:35.430 running like really fast, 00:08:35.430 --> 00:08:38.790 but then they found out that Quake was this weird edge case 00:08:38.790 --> 00:08:41.590 and the architecture would have to be completely redone. 00:08:41.590 --> 00:08:43.550 I mean, to give you guys some idea of the dysfunction, 00:08:43.550 --> 00:08:47.410 at one point there were three to four software teams 00:08:47.410 --> 00:08:49.410 with different ideas and working on 00:08:49.410 --> 00:08:51.510 different rendering architectures. 00:08:51.510 --> 00:08:52.990 But depending who you ask, 00:08:52.990 --> 00:08:55.190 the continued development would have been worth it. 00:08:55.190 --> 00:08:56.910 I mean, imagine this. 00:08:56.910 --> 00:09:01.650 Instead of turning anti-aliasing on for an entire scene, 00:09:01.650 --> 00:09:03.030 imagine if a game developer 00:09:03.030 --> 00:09:04.850 could say, well, you know what? 00:09:04.850 --> 00:09:08.690 This sky is not important to be anti-aliased. 00:09:08.690 --> 00:09:11.190 Why don't we just focus all of our AA 00:09:11.190 --> 00:09:15.770 on these characters here or this foliage there? 00:09:15.770 --> 00:09:16.950 Or how about this? 00:09:16.950 --> 00:09:20.850 Like, oh crap, that texture wasn't loaded. 00:09:20.850 --> 00:09:21.690 You know what? 00:09:21.690 --> 00:09:24.670 Let's just procedurally generate a placeholder. 00:09:24.670 --> 00:09:26.050 Boom. 00:09:26.050 --> 00:09:29.010 Arguably the stupidest decision that was made 00:09:29.010 --> 00:09:32.470 was to make the Larrabee graphics team 00:09:32.470 --> 00:09:35.010 and the Gen graphics team, 00:09:35.010 --> 00:09:36.050 which is what Intel calls 00:09:36.050 --> 00:09:38.550 its integrated graphics internally, 00:09:38.550 --> 00:09:42.250 compete together for the same budget 00:09:42.250 --> 00:09:45.110 and then like make internal presentations 00:09:45.110 --> 00:09:48.470 arguing about why their approach was good in the future 00:09:48.470 --> 00:09:50.790 and the other groups was bad and not the future 00:09:50.790 --> 00:09:53.170 because they were both perfectly suitable 00:09:53.170 --> 00:09:55.470 for what they were doing. 00:09:55.470 --> 00:09:59.350 Larrabee was never going to be a five watt part 00:09:59.350 --> 00:10:01.590 that you could bake right into a CPU. 00:10:02.470 --> 00:10:05.790 A 200 watt PCI express part 00:10:05.790 --> 00:10:09.300 was nowhere on the roadmap for Gen. 00:10:09.300 --> 00:10:12.810 So what I've got here, come on, come on, come on, 00:10:12.810 --> 00:10:15.650 is not Knight's Ferry. 00:10:15.650 --> 00:10:17.950 That was the first Larrabee revision 00:10:17.950 --> 00:10:20.370 that had some deal breaking bugs. 00:10:20.370 --> 00:10:22.950 Apparently the saying in the hardware industry is 00:10:22.950 --> 00:10:25.490 always plan to make a prototype 00:10:25.490 --> 00:10:27.790 since you'll end up making one anyway. 00:10:27.790 --> 00:10:30.430 So this is Knight's Corner 00:10:30.430 --> 00:10:33.070 and probably has anywhere from six to 16 00:10:33.070 --> 00:10:36.570 16 gigs of RAM and up to 62 cores, 00:10:36.570 --> 00:10:40.210 depending on how many of them had some manufacturing flaws. 00:10:40.210 --> 00:10:41.970 Should we fire it up? 00:10:41.970 --> 00:10:42.810 I mean, come on. 00:10:43.910 --> 00:10:46.470 I wasn't not gonna do that at this point. 00:10:46.470 --> 00:10:51.460 I spent like $400 on this thing off of eBay. 00:10:51.460 --> 00:10:53.620 I've got no drivers for it. 00:10:53.620 --> 00:10:56.180 So it's actually, this is the first time I've turned it on. 00:10:56.180 --> 00:10:58.720 So it is very possible that it won't manage 00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:01.340 to display anything even in 2D, 00:11:01.340 --> 00:11:03.810 but I definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, 00:11:03.810 --> 00:11:07.600 definitely have to try. 00:11:07.600 --> 00:11:09.400 By the way, if anyone out there 00:11:09.400 --> 00:11:12.460 has the secret sauce drivers 00:11:12.460 --> 00:11:14.840 or has access to the secret sauce drivers 00:11:14.840 --> 00:11:17.110 that would make this run games, 00:11:17.110 --> 00:11:21.200 please hit me up. 00:11:21.200 --> 00:11:23.660 I mean, assuming that it even works, 00:11:23.660 --> 00:11:26.930 which we don't know yet. 00:11:26.930 --> 00:11:28.410 I actually haven't tried this. 00:11:28.410 --> 00:11:31.270 I wanted to save the suspense for the video. 00:11:31.270 --> 00:11:33.330 This is like far more post codes 00:11:33.330 --> 00:11:36.540 than I'm accustomed to seeing, 00:11:36.540 --> 00:11:38.040 but it hasn't stopped. 00:11:38.040 --> 00:11:39.980 And it hasn't rebooted. 00:11:39.980 --> 00:11:45.650 We've got some kind of LED on here. 00:11:47.640 --> 00:11:49.400 It looks like it stalled on D6, 00:11:49.400 --> 00:11:51.560 but I don't know what that is. 00:11:51.560 --> 00:11:52.920 Now, when I talked to Tom, 00:11:52.920 --> 00:11:56.680 he did specifically mention it's got DVI soldered to it. 00:11:56.680 --> 00:11:58.340 Now, I don't know if that's because DVI 00:11:58.340 --> 00:12:01.780 was the most relevant output at the time. 00:12:01.780 --> 00:12:03.680 So that's like what they used internally, 00:12:03.680 --> 00:12:06.960 or if the DisplayPort and HDMI were just dummies 00:12:06.960 --> 00:12:08.980 and DVI was the only thing that actually worked. 00:12:08.980 --> 00:12:13.320 So, take two, I'm gonna run and grab a DVI monitor 00:12:13.320 --> 00:12:14.600 and gonna try this again. 00:12:14.600 --> 00:12:17.120 Like, I kind of wonder about, 00:12:17.120 --> 00:12:19.600 you know, what it's PCI-e. 00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:25.780 I mean, would that be even Gen 2 at that point? 00:12:25.780 --> 00:12:33.200 Like 2007, 2009. 00:12:33.200 --> 00:12:34.460 I wonder about compatibility 00:12:34.460 --> 00:12:38.180 with the new board and stuff like that. 00:12:38.180 --> 00:12:39.000 You know what? 00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:41.940 I don't think it's gonna boot. 00:12:41.940 --> 00:12:44.520 Well, that's pretty disappointing. 00:12:44.520 --> 00:12:45.740 I thought I might be onto something 00:12:45.740 --> 00:12:46.940 with the whole DVI thing. 00:12:46.940 --> 00:12:51.190 I'm just gonna try, I'm gonna try one other slot 00:12:51.190 --> 00:12:56.680 just to, I think there's only one other one 00:12:56.680 --> 00:12:59.260 out in the wild and some like Russian collector 00:12:59.260 --> 00:13:00.980 of like weird hardware has it. 00:13:00.980 --> 00:13:03.980 Yeah, not you, a different one. 00:13:04.980 --> 00:13:07.660 Okay, sometimes it hangs on 79 for a bit 00:13:07.660 --> 00:13:09.380 and then this thing boots. 00:13:09.380 --> 00:13:12.180 So that might've been a good sign. 00:13:12.180 --> 00:13:13.620 No, that's D6 again. 00:13:13.620 --> 00:13:16.830 I think it's not going anywhere. 00:13:16.830 --> 00:13:18.670 Well, that was disappointing, 00:13:18.670 --> 00:13:21.670 but I'm gonna let it keep trying 00:13:21.670 --> 00:13:26.500 while I tell you guys about Mastrop. 00:13:26.500 --> 00:13:28.640 I'm like sad, it's like hard to have any energy. 00:13:28.640 --> 00:13:31.240 Okay, I'm gonna try that again. 00:13:31.240 --> 00:13:33.680 Mastrop, Mastrop is featuring 00:13:33.680 --> 00:13:37.320 the Sennheiser PC37X gaming headset. 00:13:37.320 --> 00:13:39.640 They've got angled drivers and an open back design 00:13:39.640 --> 00:13:41.780 and the drivers actually come from the same family 00:13:41.780 --> 00:13:45.380 as the HD598 and HD600 headphones. 00:13:45.380 --> 00:13:49.000 They offer superior stereo imaging and locational accuracy 00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:50.700 and come with a noise canceling microphone. 00:13:50.700 --> 00:13:53.980 They're available on Mastrop at the link below 00:13:53.980 --> 00:13:57.520 for a limited time for just 120 US dollars. 00:13:57.520 --> 00:13:59.490 So go check them out. 00:13:59.490 --> 00:14:00.770 So thanks for watching guys. 00:14:00.770 --> 00:14:03.310 If this video sucked, you know what to do, 00:14:03.310 --> 00:14:07.530 but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button. 00:14:07.530 --> 00:14:08.910 You can especially hit that like button 00:14:08.910 --> 00:14:10.030 if you wanna make me feel better 00:14:10.030 --> 00:14:12.790 about how disappointed I feel right now, 00:14:12.790 --> 00:14:14.750 or you can check out the link to where to buy the stuff 00:14:14.750 --> 00:14:17.370 we featured in the video description. 00:14:17.370 --> 00:14:19.410 Also linked in the description is our merch store, 00:14:19.410 --> 00:14:20.770 which has cool shirts like this one 00:14:20.770 --> 00:14:26.320 and our community forum, which you should totally join. 00:14:26.320 --> 00:14:29.100 Oh, I really, I was really hoping 00:14:29.100 --> 00:14:31.020 I was just gonna get the screen to light up. 00:14:31.020 --> 00:14:39.890 That was all I was really, that was all I really wanted. 00:14:39.890 --> 00:14:42.180 Good night, sweet prince. 00:14:42.180 --> 00:14:43.780 You were too good for this world.