That's always been a question for long time observers of Intel. . . will they have the sticktoitiveness to hang around and make rev 2 and rev 3 better, and in timely fashion.
There's a mountain to climb there, no question, and they can't climb it all at once. Everything we know about graphics history of the last 12 years or so tells us that conclusively.
Larrabee has a few things going for it that I feel should be sufficient to carry it through a revision or two.
CPU designers admit that the utility of symmetric multicore drops to near zero after 4 standard cores, outside of certain lucrative but still limited market segments.
Intel admits there is a need for different methods to further the usability of massively multicore architectures.
In that respect, the work put into Larrabee is work Intel needs to do anyway.
Larrabee's core design may also share the same design philosophy as Intel's Silverthorne core, and in-order 2-wide x86 (besides the vector unit). The core itself is simple enough that design costs are small, with the big difference being in the cache and uncore: areas Intel needs to improve anyway.
I think that means that a fair amount of Larrabee's expense is incremental to things Intel is doing anyway. Better, it's an attempt to get revenue on work that would otherwise not bear fruit for many more years.
The possible upside?
Larrabee's very likely to be a very strong competitor for GPGPU. In addition, it will compete in HPC in a number of areas that AMD's Bulldozer should have gone in (according to early slides showing it's prowess in HPC).
With one design effort, Intel furthers massive multicore design, hurts the revenues of GPGPU, makes some money in HPC and possibly graphics, and sucker-punches AMD's next-gen design effort on two fronts (Three, if we discover Silverthorne is distantly related to it and hurts Bobcat. Via gets nailed too).
Even if Larrabee fails in consumer graphics, it should be of interest to HPC. Even if it fails there, the other benefits would be enough that Intel could swallow a few weak iterations and still do well as a whole.
This might be an Itanium-type situation. As poorly as it did early on, the product is now profitable on an operations basis and it helped kill off several wobbly RISC lines in the high-end. POWER and SPARC are primarily the remaining RISCs that still exist in non-embedded or telecom. SPARC isn't growing and its new products are in a niche (one that Larrabee could also target...).
IBM is working seriously hard to maintain a leap-frog relationship with a design that is far more intensive on all levels of the system than Intel's.
Wouldn't a successor have to begin development long before the precursor was released, and would they have been able to identify weaknesses in time to be fixed?
The product should be taped out long before the successor's design is frozen.
They'll have some good ideas from running engineering silicon where some improvements could be made.
Larrabee II should also benefit from the software and driver snafus that might pop up for the design that first wades into the real world.
