May 14 - 4:50pm EDT   Intel at the opening of Saarland University's Visual Computing Institute on Wednesday gave clues as to its plans for its many-core Larrabee graphics processor. In a presentation to guests, the semiconductor firm showed that the design uses 32 processor cores and mates each of these with its own vector math unit, allowing each core to process very specialized tasks very efficiently. They also have a pool of cache memory and a memory interface on their edges. [full story]

August 4 - 8:25am EDT   Intel today provided some initial details of its Larrabee graphics architecture and thus its first attempt to directly challenge stand-alone graphics chipsets from AMD and NVIDIA. The semiconductor firm believes it has solved the problems of extending graphics features by using multiple, complete x86 processor cores that are more consciously designed to recognize multiple program threads and support Hyperthreading to run more than one thread at the same time; it also adds a dedicated vector processor per core to aid in graphics-related tasks. [full story]

March 17 - 4:55pm EDT   Speaking to the press in a conference call, Intel has revealed more details on some of its upcoming processor technologies. Among these is "Larrabee," an upcoming graphics chipset; while it should be integrated into motherboards, as Intel has done with most such efforts, the company says it expects to produce dedicated cards, raising the specter of competition with NVIDIA and AMD/ATI. Larrabee processors should scale to the multi-teraflop level, and will use a global cache shared by all cores. Larrabee products should begin shipping in 2009. [full story]