German tech-journal Heise caught up with Intel's Pat Gelsinger for an article discussing the company's past and future as the silicon giant heads towards 40 years of service this 18th of July.

Among several topics, came up the most interesting one, visual computing and Intel's plans on it. 'Larrabee' strikes as a buzzword. It is the codename of Intel's upcoming graphics processor (GPU) architecture with which it plans to take on established players such as NVIDIA and AMD among others.

What's unique (so far) about Larrabee is that it's entirely made up of x86 processing cores. The Larrabee is likely to have 32 x86 processing cores. Here's a surprise: These processing cores are based on the design of Pentuim P54C, a 13+ year old x86 processor. This processor will be miniaturised to the 45nm fabrication process, they will be assisted by a 512-bit SIMD unit and these cores will support 64-bit address. Gelsinger says that 32 of these cores clocked at 2.00 GHz could belt out 2 TFLOPs of raw computational power. That's close to that of the upcoming AMD R700. Heise also reports that this GPU could have a TDP of as much as 300W (peak).With inputs from Heise