Intel has briefed people about its first its "many-core" Larrabee chip ahead of a paper it is presenting at the SIGGRAPH 2008 graphics industry conference in Los Angeles on August 12. Intel says:
The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry's first many-core x86 Intel architecture, meaning it will be based on an array of many processors. The individual processors are similar to the Intel processors that power the Internet and the laptops, PCs and servers that access and network to it.
Larrabee is expected to kick start an industry-wide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers.
This is probably going to ship hundreds of millions and generate tons of coverage, but there's a good intro with block diagrams at Ars Technnica: Larrabee: Intel's biggest leap since the Pentium Pro.
Intel is in the process of taking over the market, having expanded from the time when processors came on different chips from maths co-processors, memory managers and cache RAM, and you could buy an alternative maths processor from Weitek. Now Intel supplies integrated processors with accompanying chip sets, integrated sound and grahics, and wireless modules. The specialist graphics chip manufacturers are next in line, and Intel its preparing its metaphorical tanks to invade their turf.
