Intel have finally came forward and shown us some details of their upcoming Larrabee graphics chip, which they hope will compete with the big players in the industry - ATI and Nvidia. They showcased the GPU at the Intel Developers Forum in San Fransisco, along side their upcoming 6 core Westmere processors, also known as Gulftown.

 

The Larrabee GPU is supposedly on par with an Nvidia GeForce GTX285, but with ATI's latest cards thrashing this, it will be interesting to see how Intel justify it, possible with a low price or maybe two or more Larrabees in one package? Larrabee is unique in several ways, it supports x86 instructions, all of its cores have cache coherency and it uses tile-based rendering to accomplish task like z-buffering, clipping, and blending that its competitors do in hardware, with software instead. All of these features add together to form something that is, in theory, easier to program games for than NVIDIA and AMD's offerings.

 

The GPU still has plenty of time to be improved and fine tuned as it's not expected until the first half of 2010. Intel say they are now lining up board partners for the new card, although we have no idea which companies they have in mind.

 

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