In the northern hemisphere, spring is always the time for new things: lambs, leaves and Larrabee chipsets. Yes, it’s the Intel Developers Forum in Beijing again, where Intel shows off its latest kit to the other manufacturers.Pride of place was given to the Nehalem chipset, which features up to eight cores and uses simultaneous multi-threading across up to four cores. Intel showed a 25 per cent increase in performance over Penryn processors, and up to a 33 per cent reduction in power usage.Also demonstrated was a Nehalem-powered game engine, featuring a meteor strike and flames spreading realistically through a village, with graphics, physics and animal Al being handled by different parts of the processor. Intel’s Ron Fosner said that multi-core chips could take over from discrete graphics cards, and are capable of providing a gaming experience reserved for top-end graphics cards. The Nehalem is expected in early 2009.Still in its infancy, the Larrabee graphics processing unit marks Intel’s re-entry into the graphics cards. It features a 16 to 24 core chipset, capable of processing different instructions for ray-tracing or physics effects. Intel also showed off its Tukwila and Dunnington processors. Details on
