PC gaming has always been fairly costly due to the constant need to upgrade your hardware. One of the most important things PC gamers usually upgrade are their video cards. There has been a constant battle between nVIDIA and AMD for market dominance, but it looks as though Intel has a different future in mind, whereby graphic cards may become obsolete.

With Intel’s unveiling of their new Larrabee co-processor, it has become apparent that AMD and nVIDIA’s graphic chips may no longer compete. The Larrabee introduces an entirely new approach to graphics processing and delivers a single new architecture that may even decrease sales of their conventional CPUs.

Though it is yet to be determined how many cores the Larrabee chip will contain, Intel has been quoted as mentioning that 10 Larrabee cores can fit in the same space as a 65nm Core 2 Duo die! Since the Larrabee chip is based upon 45nm technology, it is conceivable that Larrabee chips will have at least 32 cores and deliver 100X the floating point instructions of a Core 2 Duo processor.

Even if the possibilities are staggering, there is still at least a year until it’s actual release in the market. By that time, who knows what AMD or nVIDIA has in store.

-Stephen