Intel Corp. unveiled more details its long-announced Larrabee technology, which will feature multi-core chips to handle graphics used for computer games and animation. The actual product will not hit the market before next year or 2010.

Intel seeks to venture in the graphics chip market dominated by NVIDIA and AMD-ATI. However, skeptics are not convinced that the leading chip maker can displace any of the two entrenched graphics veterans. Intel's graphics chips so far were many times slower than the average chip from the two leading video card companies.

Intel wants to use the popular x86 instruction set for its shader cores instead of a proprietary graphics-focused instruction set, which has raised eyebrows because it actually means that advanced functions will be software-based rather than embedded in the hardware. Intel last made a discrete graphics chipset in the late 1990s, when its subsidiary Real3D created an AGP and PCI graphics accelerator, the Intel740, an entry-level graphics chip.

The team that created Larrabee is not Intel's Graphics Division, which is working on the weak, low-power integrated video solutions, but rather Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon design team, which worked on Pentium 4. Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer said the chip acts like a GPU but actually is a large number of x86 cores put together inside PCs.

Intel showed a slide with core counts ranging from 8 to 48 at a briefing, with hundreds of cores possible in the future. More details will allegedly be provided later, at Siggraph 2008.

In April, NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang went on an Intel-related rant at a meeting with financial analysts. NVIDIA said, backed by performance slides, that Intel integrated graphics technology will only have performance in the range of today's sub-$100 discrete cards from both AMD/ATI and nVIDIA, in two years' time. Indeed, nVIDIA's technology available now will still be able to outperform Intel's integrated solution as far out as 2010. By then, nVIDIA will be two hardware generations father, with a few-fold increase in performance.