Intel Unveils Its Multi-core Graphics Processor, "Larrabee"

Microprocessor Company Intel Corporation disclosed Monday the first details on a graphics chip that it hopes will pose a huge challenge to Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI division, the two top graphics chip makers.

Demonstrating its next-generation microchip technology, code-named Larrabee, yesterday at San Francisco, Intel, the world's largest maker of semi-conductors, said the new chip architecture will feature multi-core chips to handle graphics used for computer games and animation.

Larrabee is designed to improve performance by putting more 'cores' on a chip, rather than focusing attention on developing a single chip to run faster, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant said. However, Intel didn't disclose how many cores will be offered in Larrabee and how they'll be different from the graphic chips used by its rival tech giants, Nvidia and AMD-ATI.

Based on the Pentium processor core design, Intel’s Larrabee will be a standalone graphics chip to deliver stream processing (GP-GPU) performance. Intel has tried to differentiate Larrabee by using the x86 architecture-based cores in it, making it enable to deliver full CPU programmability and support for OpenGL and DirectX APIs.

With support for highly parallel computing applications, Larrabee enables developers to develop new highly specialised graphics APIs as well as generic CPU APIs for new features.

"What the graphics and general data parallel application market needs is an architecture that provides the full programming abilities of a CPU, and the full capabilities of a CPU together with the parallelism inherent in graphics processors. This is exactly what the Larrabee provides, and is a practical solution to the limitations of current graphics processors," said Larry Seiler, chief architect of Intel's visual computing group.

Intel’s new "multi-core" computer processing technology has 1024 bits-wide bi-directional network, 512 bits in each direction, for rapid communication with low latency between the cores.

With the launch of Larrabee, Intel is apparently intends to swarm the graphics market which is currently dominated by Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division, both of which are currently shipping processors with more than 200 cores and have plans for high-end processing chips with more than 500 cores by the end of this year.

The new Larrabee-based processors are due to enter the market only in late 2009 or early 2010, primarily for the high-end PC gaming market and industries.

Interestingly, Larrabee is not created by Intel's Graphics Division, which is working on the weak, low-power integrated video solutions, rather chip maker’s Hillsboro, Oregon design team, which worked on Pentium 4 engineered the new graphics chip.

Intel will release the full details on Larrabee in a paper that it will present at the SIGGRAPH 2008 graphics industry conference, Aug. 12 in Los Angeles.