Larrabee is the name of the highly flexible chip Intel will use to compete with AMD and NVIDIA on the graphics card market. We don’t know very much about Larrabee except from the fact that it’s suppose to be very flexible, rasterize pixels like there’s no tomorrow and of course bring the possibility of raytracing to game developers. NVIDIA has had its SLI technology since late 2004, while AMD has had its equivalent multi-GPU technology CrossFire since late 2005 (upgraded to CrossFireX last year).
Intel has no intention of being worse and will launch a multi-GPU technology of its own to support up to four Larrabee-based cards in the same system. These systems will not only be used for graphics, but also for heavy-duty computing, such as modelling and simulations. We’re not entirely sure, but it seems the multi-GPU technology will launch a bit after Larrabee does, but then again its a year to go, before we will see Larrabee.
