May 15th, 2009
Intel Larrabee to have 32 cores, ship in 2010
Intel has hinted to its plans for its multiple-core Larrabee graphics processor, showing a design that uses 32 processor cores and mates each to its “own vector math unit, allowing each core to process very specialized tasks very efficiently,” according to Electronista.
The news was revealed at the opening of Saarland University’s Visual Computing Institute this week, where Intel promised $12 million toward the new Intel Visual Computing Institute over the next five years.
[Related: Gauging the return on R&D: Do tech giants spend too much?]
Earlier this week, Intel was fined $1.45 billion for in an antitrust case with the European Commission.
The Larrabee chips are also reported to “have a pool of cache memory and a memory interface on their edges.” At the event, Intel VP of corporate technology Joseph Schultz mentioned that Intel is now looking at a release date of the first half of 2010, moved back from the company’s original late-2009 target.
Larrabee is the Intel’s latest high-performance graphics design that is intended to compete with true dedicated video chipsets (more information on Larrabee from ZDNet’s John Morris here; a nice Wikipedia breakdown here; and the real nitty-gritty from Intel in PDF here).
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
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