While Intel makes many chips and technologies for all sorts of computing, its known for its CPUs. Now Intel is ready to take on a whole new challenge in the area of graphics with its upcoming Larrabee GPU.
Larrabee's raison d'être is to give Intel something to push back with against AMD and Nvidia. It won't be a direct competitor to Radeons and GeForces, as Larrabee is fundamentally different from present GPUs on the market
Notably, Larrabee's architecture is based off the Pentium P54C design and will use the x86 instruction set. The nature of the design makes Larrabee better suited to the term of the GPGPU. Larrabee is expected to function as a modest rasterizer, but could have the edge the computationally-heavy method of raytracing.
At IDF 2009, Intel made its first public demonstration of Larrabee – running on a Gulftown system, no less. Check it out in the video embedded below: