New Intel Graphics Chips Could Have Wider Uses
Date : 06 Aug 2008 Category : Technology
NewsFactor NetworkThe new microprocessor family, code-named Larrabee, will be available in late 2009 or early 2010. Intel is releasing the details of its plans before the Siggraph industry conference starts in Los Angeles next Monday.
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 handhelds and even supercomputers.
The market for add-on graphics accelerators, 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."
Intel 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 of them have had the impact of its x86 family, which was originally introduced three decades ago. Architectures that have been less successful include the Itanium and the 432, neither of...