Since the primitive 4004 chip first designed for a line of calculators, Intel has been a processor company. And in all of the company's decades of processor design and fabrication, Intel has seen only one truly disruptive change in the basic microarchitecture of its processors: the Pentium Pro, which dramatically improved on the performance of its predecessor, the Pentium, by introducing an execution model that dynamically reshuffled the instruction stream for optimal execution.
Intel's forthcoming Larrabee product, which the company revealed in an extended briefing on Friday, is the second major disruptive change to Intel's core processor business since the Pentium Pro. I'll justify this claim at a later date with a more extended treatment of Larrabee, but for today I'll cover the highlights from the Friday briefing.
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