Intel dumbs down marketing again with Xeon Phi

MIC joins Larrabee as thoughtcrime in Santa Clara

Intel Xeon Phi LogoIntel has finally come up with a name for Larrabee, and it fits in to their current branding perfectly. That is to say it is not only stupid, but lowers the bar while lacking any useful purpose.

Intel Larrabee, now called MIC, is now now called Xeon Phi. In a 22 page slide deck, Intel had three worthwhile data points, the Phi name, that it will ship with 8GB of GDDR5, and will have 1TF of DP performance. That is almost enough to catch it up to GPUs with half the die area on a -1 process node. The rest, 22nm, PCIe card, and discrete program running have all been previously disclosed. Multiple times. Over yet a higher multiple of slide pages.

SemiAccurate will spare you, the reader, the rather tortuous explanation of why Phi is, according to Intel, a brilliant name. Lets just say it is less pained than the iSomethingmeaningless bullsh*t, but equally useless. At least this one isn’t as user abusive. Yet. There is still time.

If you are wondering why we are taking yet another article to bash the mind-bogglingly awful Intel messaging, it is simply because they keep inflicting hour long briefings and slide decks lasting tens of pages without so much as a useful technical fact or two. The best we got was “>50 cores”, being hit on the head with a hammer imparts more insight than these pseudo-facts. Be still my beating heart. Luckily, we had an actual AMD technical talk to go to during that ‘briefing’, dodged that bullet. Come on Intel, you can do better, you really can’t do worse.S|A

The following two tabs change content below.

Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate