As the battle for the number of cores increases, Intel has bigger plans in mind. We all have probably heard about the Intel’s new GPU larrabee by now.

Here are a few facts about Intel Larrabee:

• Larrabee is not a GPU. Yes. It is a codename for a CPU microarchitecture. Larrabee is a multi-core microarchitecture like the duo and the quad. It is based on the Pentium P54c and has been designed to cater to different sections of users based on their processing usage. Thus each category of users gets different number of cores as per needs.
• The larrabee will have at least 8 cores per die with each one having it’s own L1 cache and sharing a huge L2 cache pool of 256 kb for each core. The L2 cache will facilitate inter-core communication and if necessary, a core can lock some part of the L2 cache for streaming data.
• It will be based on the x86 architecture, thus compatible with the greater part of the software world.
• It has a “Fixed Functional Unit” which can be programmed to implement DirectX or OpenGL. Here comes the GPU probabilities. The “Fixed Functional Unit” can also be used to implement hardware encryption on a server.
• This “Fixed Functional Unit”  will perform hardware emulation thereby discarding need for emulated software renderers.
• Larrabee is a vector complete processor(processors processing multiple data at the same time). It can run 16 pixels at the same time.

So you can use this product scalably. On one hand while it can render game raytracing, it can also be used for raytracing rendering over networks.