Intel’s test for new business ideas has always been: will it make $1B in the first year?

It leads to mistakes like you mention, where a new market segment or new entrant is not a sure thing. And then it leads to mistakes like Larrabee and Optane where they talk themselves into overconfidence (“obviously this is a great product, we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t guaranteed to make $1B in the first year”).

It is very hard to grow a business with zero risk appetite. You can’t take risky high return bets, and you can’t acknowledge the real risk in “safe” bets.

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twoodfin 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

If Intel had a server SKU with fully integrated, competitive performance GPU cores that work with CUDA + unified memory, they’d sell billions worth in a day to the CSPs alone.

Sounds like they will someday soon.

There will always be giant, faraway GPU supercomputer clusters to train models. But the future of inference (where the model fits) is local to the CPU.

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actionfromafar 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Larrabee could have grown into something very cool if they had not dropped it and made it available on the open market, donated to universities and so on. Transputer vibes.

	▲	keyringlight 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think for Larrabee it was intel experimenting to find other markets for their Atom cores, and if there was market for it they needed to have the tenacity to cultivate it. Similar to how nvidia took huge amounts of time establishing GPGPU, CUDA, then machine learning, through to reaping the rewards over the past few years. 2010-2011 was also the time that AMD were starting to moan a bit about DX11 and the higher level APIs not being sufficient to get the most out of GPUs, which led to Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 a few years down the road. Intel did a bit regarding massively parallel software rendering, with the flexibility to run on anything x86 and implement features as you liked, or AMD's efforts for 'fusion' (APU+GPU, after recently acquiring ATi) or HSA which I seem to recall was about dispatching different types of computing to the best suited processor(s) in the system for it. However I got the impression a lot of development effort is more interested in progressing on what they already have instead of starting in a new direction, and game studios want to ship finished and stable/predictable product, which is where support from intel would have helped.
	▲	brookst 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It’s entirely possible that Larrabee could have been the platform for Transformers. Maybe, maybe not. But certainly Intel wasn’t willing to wait for the market. Didn’t make $1 billion instantly; killed.

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bflesch 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> will it make $1B in the first year?

It's typical corporate venturing and reporting to a CFO. Google is not much better with them cutting their small(er) projects.