Intel Corp., the world"s leading producer of x86 microprocessor and built-in graphics cores, may enter the market of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs) in about two years from now, a rumour published by an Asian web-site claims. This puts AMD and Nvidia into a pretty comfortable duopoly in the coming years, but the question is what happens next. It is official that Intel is working on standalone graphics chips and it seems to be logical that they company plans to enter this market about two and a half years after the rumours of its plans to re-enter the business first emerged as quite some engineers from the former 3Dlabs flee from the company to join Intel.
So far the details about Intel"s standalone graphics solutions are vague to say at least, as the developers at this point probably work on the desired capabilities and supporting technologies rather than on particular implementation. Though, VR-Zone web-site claims that rumours imply on the multi-core nature of the product and 32nm process technology (which is expected to go online in 2009).