Intel Thunder Bay Is Officially Canceled, Linux Driver Code To Be Removed

[coder]

And another project to add to the "stumble and faceplant" list.

True, but the sad part is what it probably means for Movidius. They seemed like a promising little company. IIRC, they were about to release their second-gen products, when Intel bought them.

They should've ended up in the hands of someone more serious about building embedded SoCs towards the IoT end of the spectrum.

[brad0]

True, but the sad part is what it probably means for Movidius. They seemed like a promising little company. IIRC, they were about to release their second-gen products, when Intel bought them.

They should've ended up in the hands of someone more serious about building embedded SoCs towards the IoT end of the spectrum.

That's the way I felt about Intel's Bigfoot Networks acquisition.

[Spacefish]

Much like they killed Xeon Phi.. I still think it was a cool accelerator, as it allowed you to run simulations whith different branches on the differents threads, not like GPUs which don´t have an instruction decode per "thread" (WARPs).

It would have competed with todays EPYCs in the HPC world, which are quite comparable, x86 with AVX-512, aprox. same Core count and memory bandwidth.

[coder]

Much like they killed Xeon Phi.. I still think it was a cool accelerator, as it allowed you to run simulations whith different branches on the differents threads, not like GPUs which don´t have an instruction decode per "thread" (WARPs).

Yeah, I liked the notion that you could run a general-purpose OS on it. At the time, it was one of the highest core-count monolithic processors that could run Linux. And it had in-package memory (HMC, not HBM) before practically anyone else had done that with a CPU. It also pioneered the mesh interconnect Intel has been using for the bigger Xeons since Skylake SP.

Since you could run Linux and put it in a normal Xeon CPU socket, I imagine some people might've used them for more standard server apps, if they simply needed tons of CPU threads.

It would have competed with todays EPYCs in the HPC world, which are quite comparable,

No, the CPU cores in it were merely dual-issue Silvermont + SMT4 (and AVX-512). This was the biggest disappointment. I've seen others post complaints about how hard it was to actually get decent utilization of them.

In some ways, Sierra Forest could be its spiritual successor (except for the apparent lack of AVX-512). Especially, if they make a version with HBM.

and memory bandwidth.

Maybe, if you add together its HMC + 6-channel DDR4. HMC wasn't as high-performing as HBM, though. And most people probably just used it in L4 cache mode.

Xeon Phi was an intriguing product. I liked the idea of a massively multicore general-purpose processor, but it apparently fell far short of being competitive with actual GPUs. That's what ultimately sealed its fate and ushered in the current Xe-HPC era.

[edwaleni]

Laundry list:

Intel WiMAX (discontinued)
Intel 5G LTE radios (shut down)
Intel - McAfee Security products ($7 billion +, sold to TPG)
Intel Optane (JV with Micron, sold to Asian company)
Intel WiFi (Still going)
Intel Networks (still going)
Intel Maps (former Telmap)
Intel Interactive (former Omek)
Intel Autonomous Driving (former Mobileye)
Intel Graphics (Still going)
Intel RAN (JV with Ericsson)
Intel - Zhaoxin (JV with VIA)
Intel Scientific (supercomputing) Still going