San Francisco (CA) - Intel's multi-billion dollar project is slowly gaining traction, and this year's GDC conference is the last one where Larrabee is not going to be the key topic of conversations between game developers and like.

During a very interesting presentation by Daniel Pohl of Quake 4: Ray-Trace fame, The L-word (not the TV show Lost for those of you stuck in a cave for the past few years) was not just mentioned, but a slide was published for world to see.

As you can see now, Intel is using all of resources from the Folsom Prison, Houston bull-riding bar to a Biergarten in Braunschweig to get the chip done. Given the fact that description calls for "highly parallel, programmable architecture" that is targeting "Scientific Computing, Recognition Mining & Synthesis, Financial Analytics, Health applications and Graphics", it is not a very hard thing to guess what Intel is working on - a cGPU, GPGPU chip that is set to start its life with a 12 mini-core setup, that will expand to 16 and 24 mini-cores in the future. We hope that putting huge-ass cache (4 MB) in the chip is going to solve the branching issues that GPU chips have today.

Oh yeah, it is supposed to be a great chip for IntelRT, or simply - great for Ray-Tracing. If all things go as planned, silicon should be done by year's end, and the release date should be by the end of 2009, probably 2010. frame.

Source : Tom's Hardware US