Intel's Larrabee Graphics To Take On Nvidia, ATI ... In 2010

While actual products based on Larrabee are a year or more away from being released, McCarron said Intel is wise to lay the groundwork for the ecosystem it plans to build around the new technology sooner rather than later.

"If they just dumped this out on the market when the processor was ready, it wouldn't go anywhere. They need the ecosystem and infrastructure in place," he said. The Larrabee paper highlights various programming models and software tools Intel says it is developing in partnership "with more than 400 universities, DARPA and companies such as Microsoft and HP."

The fact that Intel plans to build a discrete graphics architecture that is entirely x86-based is perhaps the key takeaway from Monday's news, though it's been known for some time. Nvidia and AMD, the two leading makers of discrete graphics for personal computers, use proprietary graphics-focused instruction sets for their products.

While it's no secret that Intel was planning an x86-based discrete graphics product, recent moves by the chip maker to expand the reach of its Intel Architecture (IA) into new product categories places Larrabee in the context of a larger story.

McCarron said the Larrabee announcement had "an echo of the old RISC versus CISC battle," referring to Intel's decades-long war with makers of non-IA microprocessors for dominance in the personal computer market. Intel won that battle -- and recently announced plans to renew its war on RISC-based chips in the embedded and consumer electronics markets.

The analyst also noted that Monday's Larrabee announcement reflects a good deal more than just Intel's intent to move into the discrete graphics market.

"That's not entirely all that this is about. This will be Intel's first re-entry into discrete graphics, but it's not really just discrete graphics. Like Nvidia has been doing, it's about the development of the parallel processor," McCarron said.

In recent years, both Nvidia and AMD have accelerated their development of products and programming tools for general-purpose computing on graphics processors, or GPGPU computing. These include hardware, such as Nvidia's Tesla and AMD's FireStream GPUs, and a C programming language called CUDA specifically designed by Nvidia for software developers to take advantage of the graphics processor's function as a low-cost "stream processor" which can be programmed to perform certain traditionally CPU-handled computational tasks simultaneously, or "in parallel," at a much more efficient rate than a central processor is capable of doing.

"You look at what's happening today on the high-end workstations. You have some dilution, where parallel processing is happening on the GPU and serial processing is happening on CPU," McCarron said.