Intel decided to offer some details about its upcoming Larrabee chip, which is scheduled for release in late 2009 at best. The company is looking to successfully step into a segment run by graphics specialists such as AMD’s ATI division and Nvidia.
The chip is being designed for graphics cards which will ensure an extremely high image detail for games and videos.
According to the company’s officials, the first Larrabee line-up will be composed of add-in boards. A special ultra-wide ring network design will be used between the many cores, in order to reduce the lag, and each core will have extensions for handling 64-bit data. The plan is to empower as many processing units (cores) as possible on a single chip, offering numerous possibilities.
The problem is that its competitors are already shipping out similar products, as Nvidia’s offer includes GPUs with more than 200 cores and AMD announced for later this year a high-end graphics chip with more than 500 cores. For Intel, there are several ways of successfully launching its product, which could include speeding up the release date, developing a far better product than the existing ones, offering its chips at a much lower price or a combination of any of the above mentioned options.
At this point, the company only wanted to announce its general plans and explained that a more detailed presentation will be offered at the upcoming Siggraph computer graphics conference, which is scheduled to take place over a period of three days in Los Angeles, starting with August 12.
Intel Corporation is the world’s largest semiconductor company, founded in 1968 and based in Santa Clara, California.