CNet News attended Intel’s talk at GDC this week, where they unveiled a few more details about their upcoming Larrabee CPU/GPU chipset.

Larrabee is “Intel’s first many-core architecture,” Forsyth said. “The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics,” he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

“But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it’s bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers,” Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel’s x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.

Given Intel’s currently legal entanglements with NVidia over licensing issues, it’s uncertain what will ever happen with Larrabee, but it’s an interesting architecture.  Intel’s a bit late to the game of massively parallel SIMD chips like NVidia & AMD/ATI use, but they’ve got the engineering knowledge and fabrication potential to put a huge dent in their competitor’s market shares.

via Intel details future graphics chip at GDC | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.