Intel offers sneak peek of next-gen chips

The company showcased several of its upcoming processors and provided further details on its planned 'Larrabee' architecture at a special media event Monday in San Francisco.

Among the new processors will be Dunnington, a six-core chip aimed at the server market. First revealed in a www.vnunet.com last month, the chip will feature 1.9bn transistors on the six cores, each sharing a 16MB cache.

Intel plans to showcase the chip at IDF in what Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, told reporters would be "the most extensive virtualisation demo that has ever been done."

"We're quite excited. It will be a tour-de-force demonstration of virtualisation technology," he said.

Also being highlighted at IDF will be the Larrabee, the new graphics processing architecture Intel hopes to debut within the next two years.

While Intel expects Larrabee to lead to a ten-fold increase in the performance of integrated graphics systems over the next three years, Gelsinger put to rest any expectations that the new platform will lead to the death of dedicated discrete graphics cards.

Gelsinger explained that not even Larrabee will be able to match the performance of dedicated graphics cards that use more resources and provide more processing muscle. Instead, the company plans for Larrabee to be the next generation of integrated graphics systems that are far more compact and require less power.

"Will integrated graphics compete with the high-end discrete cards? Absolutely not," said Gelsinger.

"A high-end discrete card is a different price point, a different power point, and integrated graphics will never touch that."