Intel says its new chips will soup up graphics
SAN FRANCISCO - Intel is planning to release today the first technical details of a new family of chips intended to soup up computer graphics and, eventually, a broad range of computing tasks.
The new microprocessor family, code-named Larrabee, will be available in late 2009 or early 2010. Intel is releasing the details of its plans ahead of the Siggraph industry conference in Los Angeles, which starts Aug. 11.
The company said it would initially aim Larrabee at the personal-computer graphics market, where its "many-core" design, with more than a dozen and eventually hundreds of processing units on a single silicon chip, would be especially useful.
But Anwar Ghuloum, an Intel parallel computing engineer, said that over the next half-decade Intel planned to make the chip design available to an increasingly broad spectrum of the computing world, from Windows and Macintosh desktop personal computers to hand-helds and even supercomputers.
The market for add-on graphics accelerators, which are prized by PC game players, is now dominated by Nvidia and the ATI division of AMD. Intel's approach will be distinguished by its reliance on the industry standard x86 instruction set, which will allow the chips to take advantage of a huge library of existing software.
In 2004, after finding that it could not make its chips faster because they were overheating, Intel adopted a strategy it referred to as a "right-hand turn." It switched to improving performance by increasing the number of processing elements, or cores, on each chip. That led first to dual-core and now quad-core chips. Analysts said the first generation of Larrabee may have 16 to 48 cores, depending on the performance goal.
Intel has tried several approaches to chip design, but none have had the impact of its x86 family, which was originally introduced three decades ago.
In contrast to ATI and Nvidia, Intel would seem to be at a significant disadvantage; next-generation ATI and Nvidia chips will have 800 and 256 cores, respectively, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.
