 Intel keeps very careful track of its internal engineering samples going to great lengths to ensure that if They leave the lab it is in pieces so small that they could never be reassembled again So the first question we need to answer is How did we get our hands on this thing? eBay obviously what can't you buy on eBay a Sponsorship online is tech tips for that you have to talk to Colton like Corsair did Corsair's dark core se RGB wireless mouse features 1-millisecond 2.4 gigahertz and low latency Bluetooth connectivity check it out at the link below So the seller turned out to have been a Contractor at Intel a few years ago who in the middle of a sixth floor renovation Went dumpster diving through the boxes full of junk that was destined for the e-waste pile apparently it was a treasure trove of press samples laptops and this GPU looking thing that was noteworthy for being blue instead of green or red you see by that point project Larabee this Sort of had been canceled for years and how many years depends on which cancellation you're going by So talking to Tom Forsythe who was one of the key team members He figures they got canceled anywhere from four to five times and remembers getting these weird memos Yeah You guys are gonna see some headlines It's just a thing none of you are laid off. Just keep on working BTWs you've been rebranded Xeon 5. Thanks. Bye. So What is this thing? that's actually a somewhat complicated question, but Because it's got a DVI port not to mention display port and HDMI soldered onto it. It is technically an engineering sample board for Intel's first and to date only Dedicated graphics card now Most people who follow the mainstream tech press believe that project Larabee was an abject failure But as is so often the case the truth is actually stranger than fiction Not only was it a success, but it powered th2 which was the world's most powerful supercomputer for over two years and Ten years later you can actually still buy its descendants either in socketed form as we reviewed Just last year or on Amazon for a cool 1500 greenbacks So as it turns out the goal of the program never was actually to create a Gaming GPU that was just a workload that was already fairly well understood at the time because you gotta remember back in the mid 2000s the idea of using a GPU as a general purpose Computing unit was just emerging so this this idea of using it for gaming was actually just a small part of a business case to build a processor that had many highly efficient x86 cores that could be easily just like slotted into these powerful supercomputers but 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 graphics they had about 300 of the top selling games on Steam Running on the thing with a card just like this one as the only GPU in the system and the way this whole thing worked is incredible now a normal graphics card or GPU rather uses a lot of fixed function hardware, so if you told it Okay, look. I don't need shaders. Just draw a ton of tiny lines with really nice anti-aliasing So that's pretty much CAD in a nutshell it would use only a fraction of its hardware But with Larabee Everything is software so the whole chip is lit up doing that so that actually helped to offset the x86 Overhead a fair bit this was the fastest CAD card at the time and it had other benefits with regular GPUs you might run into a situation where Enabling a particular feature in a game might hit the AMD users a lot harder than the Nvidia users or vice versa So during development AMD and Nvidia they both have to actually Guess as best 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 around that Larabee no such limitation this thing is a full blown computer with up to 61 Quad threaded cores running a normal operating system like free BSD like you could actually telnet into the thing and Run a top command and see a list of all the processes that were running on it And if you were running a game you'd see I don't know 128 or or 200 processes called Direct X graphics and you could do that While the thing was working so if you wanted you could Cordon off some of the cores and use them for something else or you could just Yolo it and throw another workload into the mix and then just let the processor manage itself the only non programmable hardware on this puppy is the texture unit which takes very simple commands a I mean wrap your brain around this The thing that I'm looking at right here is Intel's first ever Direct X 11 GPU Even though it was built before Direct X 11 So this was possible because all of those graphics card features that are normally running in hardware Are just running in software so you could actually update it to Direct X 11 or Direct X 12 with a driver update now There are some caveats here. I mean there's a reason that the thing never made it into a computer near you It wasn't as efficient as a dedicated graphics card for a lot of things so it only got about a quarter of the performance in games as a a comparably power consuming card from AMD or Nvidia at the time But it was really good at certain graphics workloads for a number of reasons And I mean if you think about it, and you look at how far off they were Considering that they were effectively Emulating dedicated hardware. It's damn impressive so What happened? Well Management happened Intel at its core. Haha is a hardware company so they wanted all the features completed so they could either ship this thing or Can it because in the hardware world making up a four times difference in performance is Impossible and you might as well just pull the plug But the team wanted to work on performance optimization instead because in the software world it's not unheard of to go from like two pixels showing up on a screen and dog slow to a hundred times faster in a week if you have a Breakthrough and it got to the point where they had to have separate teams for performance and For features to get management off their backs so the performance team actually got quake running like really fast But then they found out that quake was this weird edge case and the architecture would have to be completely redone I mean to give you guys some idea of the dysfunction at one point there were three to four Software teams with different ideas and working on different rendering architectures But depending who you ask the continued development would have been worth it I mean imagine this instead of turning anti aliasing on for an entire scene Imagine if a game developer could say well, you know what this sky is not important to be anti aliased Why don't we just focus all of our a on you know, these characters here or this foliage there? Or how about this like oh crap that texture wasn't loaded. You know what? Let's just procedurally generate a placeholder boom Arguably the stupidest decision that was made was to make the Larabee graphics team and the gen Graphics team which is what Intel calls its integrated graphics internally compete together for the same budget and then like make internal presentations arguing about Why their approach was good in the future and the other groups was bad and not the future because they were both perfectly suitable for What they were doing Larabee was never going to be a five watt part that you could bake right into a CPU and A 200 watt PCI Express part was nowhere on the roadmap for gen So what I've got here Is Not Knights fairy that was the first Larabee revision that had some deal-breaking bugs Apparently the saying in the hardware industry is always plan to make a prototype Since you'll end up making one anyway So this is Knights corner and probably has anywhere from 6 to 16 gigs of RAM and up to 62 cores depending on how many of them had some manufacturing flaws should we fire it up? I mean come on I Wasn't not gonna do that at this point. I spent like $400 on this thing off of eBay I've got no drivers for it. So it's actually this is the first time I've turned it on So it is very possible that it won't manage to display anything even in 2d But I definitely have to try By the way if anyone out there has the secret sauce drivers or has access to the secret sauce drivers that would make this run games please Hit me up. I mean Assuming that it even works, which we don't know yet. I Actually haven't tried this I wanted to save the suspense for the video This is like far more post codes that I'm accustomed to seeing But it hasn't stopped and it hasn't like rebooted we've got some kind of We've got some kind of LED on here It looks like it's stalled on d6 But I don't know what that is now when I talked to Tom he did specifically mention It's got DVI soldered to it now. I don't know if that's because DVI was the most relevant output at the time So that's like what they used internally or if the display port and HDMI were just dummies and DVI was the only thing that actually worked so Take two I'm gonna run and grab a DVI monitor and gonna try this again like I kind of wonder about You know what it's PCIe. I Mean would that be? even Gen 2 at that point Like 2000 2007 2009 I Wonder about compatibility with a new board and stuff like that You know what I don't think it's gonna boot Well, that's pretty disappointing I thought I might be on to something with the whole DVI thing I'm just gonna try I'm gonna try one other slot just to I I think there's only one other one out in the wild and some like Russian collector of like weird hardware has it Yeah, not you a different one Okay, sometimes it hangs on 79 for a bit and then this thing boots. So that might have been a good sign Well, no, that's d6 again. I think it's not going anywhere Well, that was disappointing but I'm gonna let it keep trying while I tell you guys about Mastrop. Oh I'm like sad. It's like hard to have any energy. Okay, and try that again Mastrop Mastrop is featuring the Sennheiser PC 37x gaming headset They've got angled drivers and an open back design and the drivers actually come from the same family as the HD 598 and HD 600 headphones they offer superior stereo imaging and locational accuracy and come with a noise Cancelling microphone they're available on Mastrop at the link below for a limited time for just a hundred and twenty US dollars so go check them out So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked, you know what to do But if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button You can especially hit that like button if you want to make me feel better about how disappointed I feel right now Or you can check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join All I really I was really hoping I was just gonna get the screen to light up that was all I was really That was all I really wanted You You good night sweet prince you were too good for this world