well the 80 Core "lab only testing cpu" of intel already has shown that quite some stuff can be done that way.
Larrabee up to some point is a spinnoff of that internal research chip but with "simpler CPUs" (common to such "graphics oriented" devices where you do not need all the overhead of a real cpu, only the processing)
My guess is that Larrabee is not mainly focused at attacking the graphics market but adressing a much larger threat to Intel: Cell
Until recently they could just ignore its precense as it didn't attack them in their "we want to own that sector" plans, but IBM recently helped to get the first Opteron - Cell hybrid supercluster online (each opteron has 2 cell as coprocessors and manages the "common task"), which definitely is a problem to intel.
As this approach on the long run would push AMD even further in the one and only sector where Intel has been fighting for more market share for quite some time and not doing anything against it could be a serious future problem when parallelism gets more and more common.
to me it seems more like the idea behind larrabee are targeted at that and that the graphics part is mainly a "nice side spin off" to replace the X series GPU with something more capable, needed to compete against NVIDIA and ATIs new onboard GPUs that are several times faster with the same and lower power consumptions.
Larrabee up to some point is a spinnoff of that internal research chip but with "simpler CPUs" (common to such "graphics oriented" devices where you do not need all the overhead of a real cpu, only the processing)
My guess is that Larrabee is not mainly focused at attacking the graphics market but adressing a much larger threat to Intel: Cell
Until recently they could just ignore its precense as it didn't attack them in their "we want to own that sector" plans, but IBM recently helped to get the first Opteron - Cell hybrid supercluster online (each opteron has 2 cell as coprocessors and manages the "common task"), which definitely is a problem to intel.
As this approach on the long run would push AMD even further in the one and only sector where Intel has been fighting for more market share for quite some time and not doing anything against it could be a serious future problem when parallelism gets more and more common.
to me it seems more like the idea behind larrabee are targeted at that and that the graphics part is mainly a "nice side spin off" to replace the X series GPU with something more capable, needed to compete against NVIDIA and ATIs new onboard GPUs that are several times faster with the same and lower power consumptions.