One of the most anticipated products due to be released by the Santa Clara, California-based Intel is the company's first discrete graphics processing unit, also known as the Larrabee chip. This new product is said to place Intel as a strong competitor in the graphics market, challenging the industry's leading graphics chip makers, NVIDIA and AMD. However, according to some recent reports, early samples of Intel's Larrabee chip can only perform at approximately the same level as NVIDIA's high-end single-GPU GeForce GTX 285 card. Although we are still months away from a possible release, this doesn't come as good news for Intel, considering that both NVIDIA and AMD should have new cards out by the time Larrabee will be on the market.

According to a recent news-article on tomshardware citing sources close to the manufacturer, the much-anticipated Larrabee currently performs like NVIDIA's single-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX 285. This could change before the chip maker officially debuts the new cards, but for the time being it appears NVIDIA and ATI will be the only competitors in the high-end graphics market.

The rumor isn't necessarily bad for Chipzilla, which could still place its upcoming graphics chip as a competitor in the mainstream, mid-segment market, where the real money is. However, it's interesting to note that Intel has been working on Larrabee for a good while now and needs to compete with products that haven't yet been released. This will be a relatively new challenge for the chip maker, which has focused its business on providing consumers with x86 processors for both desktop and portable PC markets.

In light of the recent rumors, we should note that both NVIDIA and ATI are currently expected to announce new cards, before the end of this year, with the former said to be preparing a completely new architecture altogether.