Larrabee seens as Intel's response to AMD's ATI acquisition.
Intel has fired up speculation that it is looking to enter the market for graphics processors with its upcoming Larrabee processor.
Intel first unveiled Larrabee earlier this year at Intel Developer Conference in Beijing. It is a highly parallel processor based on the Intel Architecture that is scheduled to ship by 2008. It has been vaguely positioned as a chip for scientific modelling applications such as super computing, financial services, physics and health applications as well as graphics. It will deliver over one trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS).
In his opening keynote of the fall edition of the developer event in San Francisco today, Intel chief Paul Otellini didn't provide many new details, other than a promise to "develop this product in 2008". But the executive did spend a remarkable large amount of time on its graphics capabilities.
Jim McGregor, a director for semiconductors and enabling technologies for analyst firm Instat, argues that Intel is hinting at a future discrete graphics chip that would compete with Nvidia and ATI, a division of Intel's main rival AMD.
Intel currently offers graphics cards as part of the chipset, but doesn't design stand alone graphics cards. It could be forced to move into the market by AMD's ATI acquisition last year.
"To every move that AMD has made, Intel is making a very competitive countermove," noted McGregor.
Intel furthermore said that it would increase it development efforts for integrated graphics processors. Currently those products lag one or two processor generations behind Intel's processors. But Otellini said that the firm is speeding up development to allow the graphics processor to bring the technology up to par with its processor technology. Matching processing technologies are required for the GPU to be integrated into the CPU.