Larrabee - Intel details Share the Details...

Intel shared details with the press about their discrete GPU chip - Larrabee at San Francisco recently. It was a shame that Intel didn't share the number cores in Larrabee and how they'll be different from the graphic chips used by Nvidia and AMD-ATI. The video card containing Larrabee is expected to compete with the GeForce and Radeon lines of video cards from NVIDIA and AMD/ATI. Details are sketchy although we do know that the Larrabee chips are scalable from 8 to 48 cores, and it's enhanced with vector processing unit, multi-threading, 64-bit extensions, and pre-fetching.

Larrabee Benefits?
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. As part of Intel's Tera-scale research program, the Larrabee will be a standalone graphics chip to deliver stream processing performance, enabling full CPU programmability and support for OpenGL and DirectX APIs carrying many x86 architecture-based cores.

The x86 design will offer full support to current graphical APIs. With support for highly parallel computing applications, developers can develop new highly specialised graphics APIs as well as generic CPU APIs for new features. Larrabee will fully support IEEE standards for single and double precision floating-point arithmetic.