Intel Reveals Upcoming 'Larrabee' Graphic Chip

Intel Reveals Upcoming 'Larrabee' Graphic Chip

Intel just recently uncloaked the details of its long-awaited chip which will contend with Nvidia and ATI. Larrabee will be a  lot more different than the widely-used though low-end integrated graphics that Intel now offers in the market. 


Larrabee is the codename for a discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) chip that Intel is developing separately from its current line of integrated graphics accelerators. The video card containing Larrabee is expected to compete with the GeForce and Radeon lines of video cards from NVIDIA and AMD/ATI respectively. This graphic will use the popular x86 instruction set for its shader cores instead of a proprietary graphics-focused instruction set, and will feature cache coherency across all its cores like a multi-core CPU (and unlike current GPUs).



On August 12, 2008, Intel will present a paper describing Larrabee at SIGGRAPH. The paper is said to contain a comparison of performance between Larrabee and Core 2 Duo, which reveals that the single-threaded performance of one of Larrabee's cores is roughly half that of a "Core 2" core, while the overall performance per watt of a Larrabee chip is 20× better than a Core 2 Duo chip.