Intel held a press conference this past Friday to give journalists the first look at its upcoming Larrabee architecture ahead of the technology's official "coming out" in a technical discussion at next week's Siggraph 2008 conference.

　　Intel's Larry Seiler, senior principal engineer in the visual computing group, led the presentation. Seiler shared Larrabee's basic architectural details, but stopped short of divulging any specific product information such as processor counts or clock speeds.

　　Seiler calls Larrabee a "many-core x86 architecture" that combines the programmability of the CPU with the parallelism of the GPU. The GPU manufacturers have made huge advances in making several of the fixed-function steps in the graphics pipeline programmable, but many parts of the pipeline are still fixed.

　　Larrabee can rid the pipeline of the fixed function logic because it uses an array of x86 processing cores that can be controlled with a software renderer. Current GPUs have to let some hardware sit idle if the graphics workload composition doesn't match up with the chip's capabilities. Switching to fully functional processors and moving control to software will make more efficient use of the GPU because the system can allocate resources to better match up with the graphics workload.

　　Intel is targeting the consumer graphics market for its initial Larrabee rollout. Larrabee will be fully compatible with OpenGL and DirectX games, as the chip can mimic the traditional graphics pipeline with programmable software.

　　Larrabee will also have a tile-based renderer that can take advantage of the chip's L2 cache to reduce bandwidth requirements.

　　Developers will also have the option to write code specifically for Larrabee if they want to implement additional application features or graphics that might not run as efficiently in the standard graphics pipeline.

　　Because it's an array of processors, Larrabee will also be well-suited for all of the highly parallel processing applications that Nvidia and AMD are currently targeting with their respective CUDA and GPGPU initiatives.

　　Expect to see the first Larrabee-based graphics products in 2009 or 2010.It's too early to predict how well Larrabee graphics processors will perform against Nvidia and AMD GPUs at launch, but several Intel engineers told GameSpot that they're well aware that performance will have to be competitive in order for them to build up the large installation base they'll need to justify the project.