Intel Releases Larrabee Chip Details

Intel's new Larrabee processor chip line will feature multiple cores, as in dozens.

Intel released the technical details on Monday of the upcoming line of new microprocessor codenamed, "Larrabee". The timing of this information release was interesting though, as it was just prior to the company's presentation at the SIGGRAPH Conference in Los Angeles next week, (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques).

At first, the chips will be add-on graphic accelerators in PCs used mostly by gamers. These GPUs or graphics processing unit chips are expected to hit store shelves by the end of 2009 or early in 2010. With dozens of cores in a single chip, the design is set to handle the intense graphic processing in today's video games.

Though the design is still said to be behind Nvidia and AMD which is shipping processors with more than 200 cores today and has plans for high-end processing chips with more than 500 cores by the end of this year.

Intel still intends to use the Larrabee in the personal computing graphics market for high-end game machines that will focus on graphics applications as well as support DirectX, OpenGL, and run existing games and current programs.

Intel is focusing on the future though with the Larrabee with applications that will include engineering and scientific software.