All that and they still couldn't ship Larrabee. There's only so much you can do with a haphazardly designed ISA that dates from the late 70's. ARM is overwhelming dominant in the mobile market and very, very cheap.
To my mind Intel's quixotic purchase of McAfee only shows that they've cornered themselves into a market that's peaked.
They couldn't ship Larrabee to hit it's market window (i.e. to compete with the GPUs when it would/might have been ready). They haven't given up yet and in the meantime they're shipping it for HPC experimentation and the like.
You're right about the "haphazardly designed ISA" but they've still made it run very fast by throwing a lot of engineering effort at it.
As for McAfee, I don't know what they bleep they're trying to do there, but I suspect they can afford it (especially since AMD didn't keep their eye on the ball for so long). Their previous failed communications and media ventures didn't seem to materially hinder their bread and butter CPU/chipset business.
For sure... Atom is one of Intel's most backward products, which has received the smallest investment out of nearly all of their CPU lines. They have the capability to scale it much much higher, if there's a market for it.
Comments
Expect Intel 'Empire strikes back' in 2011 - they have the talent, fabs, money, patents.
All that and they still couldn't ship Larrabee. There's only so much you can do with a haphazardly designed ISA that dates from the late 70's. ARM is overwhelming dominant in the mobile market and very, very cheap.
To my mind Intel's quixotic purchase of McAfee only shows that they've cornered themselves into a market that's peaked.
They couldn't ship Larrabee to hit it's market window (i.e. to compete with the GPUs when it would/might have been ready). They haven't given up yet and in the meantime they're shipping it for HPC experimentation and the like.
You're right about the "haphazardly designed ISA" but they've still made it run very fast by throwing a lot of engineering effort at it.
As for McAfee, I don't know what they bleep they're trying to do there, but I suspect they can afford it (especially since AMD didn't keep their eye on the ball for so long). Their previous failed communications and media ventures didn't seem to materially hinder their bread and butter CPU/chipset business.
For sure... Atom is one of Intel's most backward products, which has received the smallest investment out of nearly all of their CPU lines. They have the capability to scale it much much higher, if there's a market for it.