Last week, Intel announced its Visual Computing Research Center at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. During its opening ceremony, details emerged about when Intel plans to commercially introduce Larrabee, the company's take on graphics processing using x86-based parallelism. The company categorically stated that one could expect Larrabee to be out only by early 2010.

"I would expect volume introduction of this product to be early next year," said Intel chief executive Paul Otellini. Until now, Larrabee was known to be introduced coarsely around the 2009-2010 time-frame. "We always said it would launch in the 2009/2010 timeframe," said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer in an email to PC Magazine. "We are narrowing that timeframe. Larrabee is healthy and in our labs right now. There will be multiple versions of Larrabee over time. We are not releasing additional details at this time," he added. In the same event, Intel displayed a company slide with a die-shot of Larrabee, revealing what looked like the x86 processing elements. Sections of the media were abuzz with inferences drawn on the die-shot, some saying that it featured as many as 32 processing elements.