The Microprocessor Report (MPR) has a feature on Intel's Larrabee, which the chip giant is slowly showing to the world. The report suggests Intel will come out with products in 2009 or 2010.

The first, as we reported earlier on this year, will be firmly aimed at the graphics processors sold by Nvidia and market by AMD as ATI technology.

But Intel's X86 Larrabee is much more than that. It can have four cores or dozens of cores, with coherent cache communicating across a ring network built in.

The fully programmable graphics pipelines are on paper more sophisticated than the hard-wiring of Nvidia graphics chips. But there's another reason why this architecture is important for Intel, reckons the MPR, and that's to give it experience of building multicores. There's parallel software currently being written for Larrabee and that is also going to help when Intel starts creating CPUs for servers with more than eight cores.

You can find the MPR here. There's a detailed description of the Larrabee architecture in a PDF, here. X