Intel's Larrabee Multi-Core Chip Will Rock on Games

Intel's multi-core graphics chip, also known as Larrabee will be capable of running games. The chip is one of the boldest graphics projects in the world and will reportedly offer full compatibility with Microsoft's DirectX technology, as well as with the OpenGL API.

As previously reported, the Larrabee graphics chip will come with no less than 16 pre-integrated graphics cores. When it finally arrives on the market, the chip will be able to deliver much more graphics horsepower than its already existing competitors on the market.

The Larrabee is more than a graphics chip: apart from the impressive number of 16 graphic-oriented cores, the chip will also be capable to process the entire x86 instruction set that comes implemented into modern processor architectures.

Imagine a graphics card that comes with 16 integrated graphics cores, that can easily reach working frequencies of 2 GHz. Things don't stop here, as the chip's modular structure allows the company to easily scale it up to a few thousand cores.

According to Pat Gelsinger, the company's senior vice president, Intel will pitch the Larrabee chip as a graphics card, with an impressive computing power that reaches more than one teraflop.

At the moment, it is unknown whether Intel will release a gaming driver along with its Larrabee chip, given the additional headache that usually occurs with such software, but recent rumors claim that Intel has already assigned between 800 and 1,200 engineers to the project, in order to take care of the chip's hardware and software aspects.

The retail version of the Larrabee silicon is expected to arrive on the market in the first half of the next year.