Even though it was Intel’s 6-core monster that got all the attention, one little gem that missed out on the publicity a bit was Larrabee, Intel’s CPU-GPU hybrid or essentially a graphic card processor, or a processor graphic card, or something along those lines.
To find out more about this demonic hybrid, hit the jump!
This move from Intel is no doubt to one-up AMD, who a while ago, announced their “Fusion” product, which was the first time the world heard of the unholy combination of a graphic card and a processor, the love-child of the AMD/ATi merger.
However, details on this Fusion have been sparse and it seems that Intel has taken that to their advantage. You might ask however, that “So what? Intel still has a while to release it, and AMD could beat them in that time.”
But you would be wrong. Intel is going to release laptops and desktop processors with the Larrabee tech built right in – yes, those Nehalem processors we talked about earlier. And even then, Intel will be releasing individual Larrabee graphics units by the final quarter of this year.
This should bode ill for AMD, who still haven’t put a release date, or even any detailed info about the Fusion. But Intel isn’t far ahead either – they aren’t exactly famous for their graphics, and unlike AMD, do not own a leading graphics card developer. I would rather that nVidia try something along these lines, however the future is going to be interesting nonetheless. Will this lead to Intel entering the graphics card race?