Intel Confirmed Larrabee Discrete GPU Availability by 2010

Intel has confirmed the date of launching for Larrabee processor to be available by first half of year 2010, which is one or two quarters behind its original speculated plan at late of 2009. This was announced by Intel spokesperson, Joseph Schultz during the opening of visual computing research center at Saarbruecken, Germany recently.

Larrabee is the Intel’s first discrete GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) emphasizes on graphics performance with intention to compete against other graphics vendors such as Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon discrete solution. The next generation graphics chip will be derived from the relatively older second generation Pentium processor core architecture, P54C core which is still being used widely in embedded market space. It is a much simpler design with superscalar and in-order execution that able to pack more functions into a similar die size and hence increase the system performance as a whole with many multi-cores and parallelism processing suitable for high end gaming and graphics media applications.

The Larrabee is expected to have a minimum of 8 cores for the entry level version with up to 32 cores for mainstream version and could potentially achieve 48 cores with a much space and cost efficient 32nm fabrication process technology in year 2010.