Intel on Monday was releasing the first technical details of a new family of chips intended to soup up computer graphics and, eventually, a broad range of computing tasks.

The new microprocessor family, code-named Larrabee, will be available in late 2009 or early 2010. Intel is releasing the details of its plans before the Siggraph industry conference starts in Los Angeles next Monday.

The company said it would initially aim Larrabee at the personal-computer graphics market, where its “many-core” design,

with more than a dozen and eventually hundreds of processing units on a singled-out silicon chip, would be particularly useful.

But Anwar Ghuloum, an Intel parallel computing engineer, said that by the next half-decade Intel planned to assemble the chip design available to an increasingly broad spectrum of the computing world, from Windows and Macintosh desktop personal computers to handhelds and even supercomputers.

The market for add-on graphics accelerators, prized by PC […]

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