Intel going for the kill??

Two weeks ago, at Bejing, Intel revealed its new plans, which revolved mostly around a new chip, codenamed Larabee. which is actually dubbed as a processor for consumer devices, which uses an array of cores running in parallel to give trillion floating point instructions per second. The processor is also x86 compatible and hence easier to program, according to Intel. The processor would go public by 2008, maybe after the Fusion release by AMD. The processor is aimed at high end scientific apps.
Another one in the making is Tolapai, which also combines x86 processor core with an encryption co-processor, which will also consume less power and space. It would go in air later this year. It is aimed at the security computing sector.
Though the Larabee chip was slated as a competitor to the Fusion processor, the real threat is actually Nehalem processor, which would have a GPU core at some point of time. The chip which would be out the late 2008 will have upto 8 cores. It is also dubbed as the "dynamically scalable procesor", meaning the intel designers would develop variants of the processor for each sector. It would also support mutithreading, and also take the most successful technologies that brought AMD to top, a faster memory controller bus and the point to point links connecting the cores. This processor would be fabricated in the 45 nm technology.
Already the Penryn processor, which is etched on 45nm cores, will provide 20% performance improvement over Core2Duo on general apps and 40% on games. This is more or a less a shrink of C2D architecture into 45nm.
Intel already is working hard with Beyond3d to get their GPU homeworks correct. So, tighten your seatbelts and watch the processor war.
codevalley