Intel have announced their new chip which is going to enter the market late next year. Code named “Larrabee”, the chip will be in addition to their on-board graphics offering they produce at the moment.

With another entrant into the graphics card market, which is dominated by the giants of NVIDIA and AMD (ATi), it should be good for consumers with Intel entering the race. Increased competition which should hopefully drive down prices, but at the very least, push the technology envelope for gamers.

And pushing the envelope is what this new project is all about. Rather than creating faster and faster GPUs, Intel are going to approach it from the multi-core angle: Squeeze as many cores onto a die as possible and let them do the math of a quick GPU. But that isn’t the only consideration for Intel - they are also expecting the technology to kick-start the computing world, preparing everyone for the 100’s or even 1000’s of cores we can expect in tomorrow’s CPUs and GPUs.

The Larrabee platform will initially work alongside DirectX and OpenGL - which hopefully means a good support for other OS’s like Linux in the future - a support that is clearly lacking with the current two big graphics cards manufacturers.