Intel Preparing Graphics Invasion With Larrabee Architecture

Intel has revealed more details about its next generation graphics chip codenamed Larrabee, which is set to be its first hybrid CPU/GPU silicon, at the opening of the Visual Computing Institute in Saarland University.

Larrabee will be Intel's answer to the growing threat posed by ATI/AMD and Nvidia, both of which have already unveiled plans to bring the battle of Graphics Processing Units to the microprocessor grounds.

Journalists present at the event were able to get confirmation that the silicon is actually working in Intel's Labs and that the products based around Larrabee will actually be released in 2010, rather than 2009.

TGDaily understands that the first device will be based on the second-generation Pentium processor, which is the P54C and was launched back in 1994. Effectively, Intel has recycled an existing architecture which is not necessarily bad, given that the Core family is derived from the Pentium 3 architecture.

Intel's graphics candidate will come with at least 8 cores at the lower end of the spectrum, scaling all the way to 64-cores. The current versions run at 1GHz but by the time it is launched, Larrabee is likely to reach 2GHz, potentially giving it a peak throughput of around 2 Teraflops.

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