Intel will take on AMD, Nvidia head to head

THE CHIP called Larrabee will have so many notches on its gun that there will likely be a gunfight at the not-so-OK corral between Intel, AMD and Nvidia next year.

Today, Stephen Smith, VP of Intel’s Digital Enterprise division, told me that Larrabee, which the firm will demo later this year, will allow the firm to build discrete graphics cards. Products will follow, and that probably means 2009.

So that will mean that it will have graphics products to compete against Nvidia and ATI.

Making 2009 an interesting year in the already highly competitive graphics market.
Larrabee will be vector based, and use shared cache across multiple cores.

Smith also disclosed some details about Nehalem’s successors. It will be followed by a 32 nanometre chip called Westmere, and Sandy Bridges in 2010. Tock. Tick. ♣

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