An Intel venture round two years within the making (and sure a number of extra years of analysis) has been canceled, which means the corporate will not be channeling efforts into making a CPU-VPU hybrid, no less than for now.

Codenamed Thunder Bay, Intel had been engaged on a system-on-chip (SoC) combining CPU cores from its Xeon processor with VPU cores from Movidius, after buying the corporate in 2016 for its laptop imaginative and prescient processor designs.

Nonetheless, a Linux patch found by Phoronix (opens in new tab) now reads: “Take away Thunder Bay particular code because the product obtained canceled and there are not any finish prospects or customers.”

Intel Thunder Bay canceled

Although particulars on Thunder Bay have been scarce, it’s seemingly that the SoC chip could have seen makes use of in IoT purposes as good know-how turns into more and more ubiquitous.

Alongside the CPU features of the SoC, VPUs would have lent themselves effectively to machine imaginative and prescient purposes, being low-power microprocessors and AI accelerators designed to take a few of the load off conventional CPUs.

It’s unclear why Intel pulled the plug on Thunder Bay, although it’s seemingly that the corporate continues to wrestle amid the financial pressures that led it to put off no less than 500 staff within the San Francisco space earlier this yr (by way of layoffs.fyi (opens in new tab)).

One Reddit (opens in new tab) person posted: “I do know individuals who labored on this who thought this was going to be an enormous product line, such a disgrace.”

One other requested: “What’s going to Intel cancel subsequent!?” Earlier this yr, Intel killed off its RISC-V developer surroundings whereas a lot of its merchandise together with the Xeon have confronted prolonged delays just lately.

Regardless of a number of indications of struggling, the corporate stays pretty eager for the yr forward because it navigates what CEO Pat Gelsinger described as a sequence of “short-term” challenges. Whether or not this implies it’s going to return to axed initiatives as soon as it is ready to is unclear, nonetheless, for now no less than, the CPU-VPU hybrid is over.

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