Larrabee, no longer a rumor or a project for the distant future, the once questionable intent of Intel getting into the 3D graphics solutions space hotly contested by AMD and NVIDIA is now an actual threat to the established visual leaders.
We’ve all known and accepted for several years where Intel offers basic graphics capabilities for general day-to-day productivity tasks that most users require, whereas those who require more graphics prowess for professional tasks or just playing games would head for one of the add-on options from NVIDIA and AMD.
However in today’s context where CPUs are getting ever more powerful with several computing cores and GPUs boasting ever higher count of shader processing units, the problem herein is that there is a large amount of untapped potential on both types of processors; some of which not being utilized (in CPUs especially) or not optimized for general tasks (GPUs in particular). As such the current problem exists where one can’t utilize the potential of both processors combined at any one time (usually), but that’s something that Intel hopes to tackle with their Larrabee project.
Published in: CPUs & Chipsets + Graphics Cards on 2008-08-06
