Intel offers up Larrabee details

Larrabee has been the subject of much debate ever since Intel’s Paul Otellini said that it would mark the company’s entry into the discrete graphics market. Unlike AMD, though, which did so by purchasing GPU maker ATI, Intel has created a graphics architecture all of its own from the ground up.

Until now, little was known about Larrabee other than it was going to feature multiple x86 cores. However, Intel is finally giving us some more details on the graphics processing architecture it hopes to debut within the next two years.

According to the company, Larrabee is expected to take advantage of an array of IA cores scalable to teraflops of processing power, a new set of vector processing instructions to speed up the performance of graphics applications, and should be compatible with existing industry APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL. In addition, the chip will reportedly feature a new cache architecture – although no details of this have been specified yet. The company is expected to demo Larrabee later this year with a launch sometime in 2009 or beyond.