It's a silly sounding name, Larrabee. But it must fill AMD 's heart with terror. It's the codename, of course, for a whole family of new processors being cooked up by Intel . And it promises to add graphics insult to AMD's existing CPU injuries.

Frankly,things are bad enough for AMD already. Since launch last summer, theCore 2 processor has been pistol whipping AMD's Athlon CPUs into burgermeat. Meanwhile, AMD's upcoming quad-core competitor, broadly known asBarcelona, looks like a pretty unambitious effort. It will certainlyhave to be some chip to take on Intel's upcoming 45nm die shrink of theCore 2 chip. Factor in recent reports of a launch delay for Barcelona and I'm beginning to get the fear about AMD's ability to compete.

Thenthere's the spectacular fashion in which the wheels have come off AMD'srecently acquired ATI graphics subsidiary. ATI's all new flagshipgraphics DX10 board, the Radeon HD 2900 XT was very late, extremely underwhelming on arrival and possibly a bit broken. The midrange variants of theRadeon HD range don't look much healthier: they've been sent back tothe fab for a respin. Not a good sign.

In that context, theemergence of the Larrabee project from Intel is just further proof ofhow far ahead of the game Intel appears to be at moment. For theuninitiated, Larrabee is an all new multi-core processor design thatmajors on floating point power.

The full feature set hasn't beenrevealed as yet, but an official Intel document turned up on auniversity website recently that reveals several fascinating newdetails.

Try these specs for size. Larrabee will be available inconfigurations ranging from 16 to 24 with clock speeds as high as 2GHzand raw performance in the 1TFlop range. The latter figure isapproximately 40 times more than an existing Intel Core 2 Duo chip.Yup, you read it right. 40 times. And the first Larrabee chips arepencilled in for as soon as 2009.

Of course, floating point poweris just one part of the overall PC processing equation - Intel will beretaining a conventional CPU roadmap for general purpose duties basedon the existing Core 2 family.

But Larrabee will take Intel intobrand new markets. Significantly, the document confirmed that a variantwith full 3D video rendering capability is on the cards. As we reported earlier this week, the rumblings on the rumour mill suggest the chip could be a joint effort with Nvidia.

Eitherway, the most fascinating aspect of the Larrabee GPU is the expectationthat it could be the first graphics processor to combine bothtraditional raster graphics with more advanced ray-tracing techniques.

Withoutgetting bogged down in the details, suffice to understand that rastergraphics are a bit of a kludge when it comes to simulating lighting.Ray-tracing is the real deal. Ask any 3D graphics professional whatthey think about ray tracing on GPUs and they'll tell it's a matter ofwhen rather than if.

Of course, AMD and ATI will know perfectlywell that ray tracing is the future. But what must be really worryingis that it presents Intel with the perfect inflection point to enterthe graphics market. ATI and Nvidia have refined raster graphics tothe point where other companies, including Intel, simply can't compete. Buta new age of ray-traced graphics will level the playing field and mightjust hand Intel a chance for the total domination of the PC platform itso dearly desires. Jeremy Laird