As it should, rumors of Intel entering the discrete graphics card market have started circulating at Computex. According to DigiTimes, that has spoken to several major graphics card vendors, Intel is planning to release its first discrete graphics card in modern times in 2008. The graphics card will be a direct attempt to reduce NVIDIA’s and AMD/ATI’s shares of the graphics card market. A market Intel is already dominating in the lower segments, but it seems Intel wants a bigger piece of the cake, and especially the high-end cake. The card is apparently estimated to sell for $300 USD, which is to us the lower portion of the high-end segment.
There’s no word on the architectural design of the GPU or even the slightest information about the card itself, but according to previous rumors, Intel has chosen a multi-core approach that will offer substantially better performance than the current line-up of GPUs.
Rumors have spoken of 16 core design with up to 16 times (sometimes 80 times) the performance of current high-end GPUs, and it will have open source drivers! The Intel GPU will be very scalable and offer the very latest in hardware technology and software/API support (DirectX 10 etc.). At least according to the rumors we’ve been hearing…
