Movement at Intel Not So Amicable After All

Last week the news of a couple of Intel long-term employees leaving the company was being played off as a simple, change of routine thing, but now, from a story on Bright Side of News, we find that it’s a problem where the parties in question were screwing up, not providing the results needed.

The screw ups seem to focus on the late, no firm delivery date in sight, arrival of the Larrabee GPUs from that division. The division tasked with delivering a great graphics solution seems to have lost the beat, and doesn’t seem to be hearing the ticks and tocks of the Intel clock.

Larrabee was supposed to put Intel on top in graphics, and totally remove the need for nVidia - at least that was the way the story went. ATi was supposed to have been worried as well. If Larrabee had been on time, systems using all Intel components  would have been flooding the market by now, leaving nVidia to suck up to the mobile markets, and AMD in a much worse position than it ever has been. Not only is this an embarrassment to the company, it certainly slows any effort to match the AMD Fusion project.

Last week, we learned that Patrick P. Gelsinger will leave Intel for EMC and tried to find out the reason for the move. From one side, the move had perfect sense. Pat was one of Andy Groove’s men, and Paul Otellini did his best to surround himself with his aces, thus the choice of Sean Maloney was logical.

But the underlying issue wasn’t that Pat was “Andy Groove’s men”, the issue was the war with nVidia and under-delivering on Larrabee.

As we all know, Larrabee project has been problematic at best. Intel start hyping up Larrabee long before it was ready, and the project broke all deadlines. We read through roadmaps and watched Larrabee slip not by quarters, but by years. After we saw roadmaps for introduction of Larrabee pushed back all the way to 2011, and hearing that a lot of key industry analysts are dismayed at Intel - Pat’s maneuvering capability was cut to a single corner.

A lot of people we talked to were disappointed at Intel “starting a war with nVidia without a product to compete”, and after hearing statements such as “Intel is a chip company, not a PowerPoint company”, it was clear to us that Intel seriously “screwed the pooch” on this one.

There is no doubt in our minds that Intel is going to deliver Larrabee, as it is the future of the company. But Intel will probably spend additional billion or so USD on making the chip work [because it is quintessentially broken in hardware, we haven't even touched the software side], and come to market with a complete line-up. But unlike the CPU division that only missed Lynnfield [Core i5-700, i7-800 series] roadmap by six months, project Larrabee is now a year late, and according to documents we saw, it won’t reach the market in the next 12 months. This will put a 45nm Larrabee against 28nm next-gen chips from ATI and nVidia, even though we know the caveat of using 45nm Fabs for the job. According to our sources, in 2011 both ATI and nVidia will offer parts with around 5-7TFLOPS of compute power, surpassing 10TFLOPS on the dual-ASIC parts. According to information at hand, Intel targeted 1+ TFLOPS of compute power for the first generation, i.e. less number crunching performance than ATI Radeon HD 4870 and nVidia GeForce GTX 285. With Larrabee coming in 2011, the company did revise that number to raise available performance.

Having the graphics division screwing up so badly, while the rest of the company continues like a Swiss movement must make the boys in the ivory towers really upset. It’s no wonder that the exodus of these long-time employees was quietly arranged (just not quietly enough). The company wanted to remove them with as little embarrassment as possible.

I’m sure that the guys at AMD and nVidia are breathing a little easier, for the moment. 2011 is not that far away.

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Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Eleanor Roosevelt

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