Intel Larrabee – Moving Into High-End Discrete GPUs

Intel Larrabee

The rumors have been circling for months now that Intel has intentions of re-entering the high-end (discrete) GPU wars. Some considered it a stretch but when you realize that as much hype as everyone puts behind the latest and greatest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, Intel ships more graphics chips than AMD and NVIDIA combined due to their integrated chipset business. The issue that most enthusiasts have with Intel graphics chips is that even by integrated graphics standards they are extremely underpowered compared to what either of the two smaller companies offer.

However, with todays announcement Intel is dropping the gauntlet and formally announcing the architecture that it believes will take gaming, and computing, to the next level with Larrabee. With SigGraph just days away Intel has passed on the documentation to the media and has given the green light to raise the curtain on how it plans to revolutionize the way games are developed. How exactly do they intend to do this? Lets take a look.

CPUs everywhere!

Just in case youve been living in a cave for the last 2 years, or in denial, Intel stepped up big with their Core architecture and has been unrivaled on the high end of CPUs since. Their approach has been low power and high out-put per clock cycle, as well as Terra-Scale computing. By focusing on adding additional performance per clock cycle Intel believes that adding processing cores is the way of the future. If you need a little more info or just want to see an 80 core CPU, we covered it back in February 2007. http://www.legitreviews.com/article/460/1/

So based on that 80 core teraflop CPU, Intel is showing just what they can do with a group of CPUs. Unfortunately, we arent going to see Larrabee until 2009-2010, but lets see what all the talk is.