IDF: Intel will make high end graphics cards

Posted at: 6:57am 19th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Intel's CEO reveals that Larrabee will offer 'discrete graphics'

You had to listen carefully to Intel CEO Paul Otellini's keynote speech to hear this announcement, as it was just a throwaway sentence, but the head of Intel quite clearly stated that a new Intel product called Larrabee would move the company 'into discrete graphics.'

As if the announcement was a bit of a slip-up, he then promptly moved on to talk about using quad-core physics in games and said no more about it in the speech. However, Otellini was quizzed about it in a question and answer session for the press later, where he again admitted that 'among the applications for Larrabee; one of them is high-end graphics.'

This confirms many rumours that Intel is planning to go head-to-head with AMD and Nvidia in the high-end discrete (meaning a standalone graphics card, as opposed to integrated graphics) graphics business. Before mentioning discrete graphics, however, Otellini explained a little about Larrabee, saying that it would be 'highly parallel,' and that it was a 'a highly parallel, many-core product comprised of an array of Intel architecture cores.'

If these were simple cores, then they could indeed be ganged up as an array of stream processors for DirectX acceleration, although Otellini also said that it had 'applications in supercomputing, in financial services, and physics and health applications.' Then again, both Nvidia and AMD are saying similar things about GPGPU and stream processing.

Intel's last foray into discrete graphics was the abysmal i740 graphics card, which failed to compete effectively with the Voodoo and PowerVR 3D accelerators at the time. However, Larrabee looks like it might be very promising.

Otellini said that Intel should be ready to demonstrate Larrabee in 2008.