Intel announced on Monday its details of a new line of graphics processors that would take on market leaders Nvidia and the ATI division of Advanced Micro Devices.

Intel will present the facts about the all new chip design, code-named Larrabee, Aug. 12 at the SIGGRAPH industry conference in Los Angeles. Intel has made the paper available online through the Association of Computing Machinery’s portal.

The first Larrabee chips will be add-on graphics accelerators in PCs used mostly by gamers. The chips called graphics processing units, or GPUs, are expected at the end of 2009 or early 2010. Intel plans to adapt Larrabee to more workloads, such as video processing, medical imaging, scientific research, oil and gas exploration, and other high-performance computing tasks.

In addition, Larrabee includes a major new hardware coherent cache design enabling the many-core architecture. The architecture and instructions have been designed to deliver performance, energy efficiency and general purpose programmability to meet the demands of visual computing and other workloads that are inherently parallel in nature.

The first Larrabee chips will have more than a dozen cores on a single silicon chip. Intel, however, says it eventually will build hundreds of processing units on a chip. In that area, however, Intel is way behind Nvidia and AMD in the multibillion-dollar graphics market. Nvidia is shipping GPUs with more than 200 cores today, and AMD is planning a high-end graphics chip this year with more than 500 cores.

Let the gaming begin with the new Larrabee chips!