Intel Corporation is presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH 2008 industry conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 12 that describes features and capabilities of its first-ever forthcoming "many-core" blueprint or architecture codenamed "Larrabee." Details unveiled in the SIGGRAPH paper include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline, a many-core (many processor engines in a product) programming model and performance analysis for several applications.

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

The co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, Pat Gelsinger told Custom PC that NVIDIA's CUDA programming model would be nothing more than an interesting footnote in the annals of computing history.

Gelsinger says that programmers simply don't have enough time to learn how to program for new architectures like CUDA. Says Gelsinger: "The problem that we've seen over and over and over again in the computing industry is that there's a cool new idea, and it promises a 10x or 20x performance improvement, but you've just got to go through this little orifice called a new programming model. Those orifices have always been insurmountable as long as the general purpose computing models evolve into the future.". The Sony CELL and the fact that it didn't live up to all its hype as something superior to current computing architectures proves his point.

Gelsinger tells that Intel's Larrabee graphics chip will be entirely based on Intel Architecture x86 cores, and the reason for that is so developers can program for the graphics processor without having to learn a new language. Larrabee will have full support for APIs like DirectX and OpenGL.