This is not the first time that Intel is entering the high-end graphics market, and it would not be the first time if it decides to call it quits. So is the computing industry ready to take another leap of faith?

"Will we succeed? I don't know. But the response so far from ISVs has been tremendous. I've been in this business for almost 30 years and I've never had a programme that has gotten more enthusiasm from ISVs than this one", said Gelsinger.

Could integrated graphics chips compete with discrete graphics? Absolultely, answered Pat Gelsinger, noting that it was just a matter of how much die area and memory bandwith you are ready to put in that souped up integrate graphics chip. Which would be at a different price point and power consumption than the current cheap and usable integrated graphics Intel, but also ATI, Nvidia and S3 have on the market.

Now it's clear (if it wasn't so far) that with Larabee Intel is going after ATI and Nvidia in the discrete graphics market with upcoming high-end graphics cards for workstations and gaming PCs. So far, Intel is pointing to 3 things that will help it achieve this goal in the 2010 time frame:

- it's cache memory expertise as well as its manufacturing superiority;

- new vector instructions (AVX that will be available in the 2010 time frame?);

- the "most successful and widely used programmable architecture in the history of computing" i.e the x86 architecture.

Here's the video of the Larabee presentation by Stephen Smith: