Huh, well, the last discrete intel GPU was wayyy back in 1999 as I recall. Earlier! The Real3D Starfighter, i740. I had one of these for testing as I recall it was predictably worse than what nVidia and 3dfx were offering at that point in time.
Due to crypto and mining and the size of the games business, it does seem wise for Intel to play in this market, though it is hella late for them to suddenly come around.
Intel hired some of the top guys at AMD for this. They seem serious this time, probably because, yeah, they need to open up some new markets.
We’ve seen this before. Intel fires up all sorts of initiatives only to dismantle them and throw them down the memory hole a year later.
More competition is good, but I doubt Nvidia is quaking in their boots just yet.
Larrabee was a research project for a whole new CPU architecture that could easily transfer commands and data between CPU and GPU.
I imagine this announcement is them basically scaling up their mobile/integratrd parts with more cores. Or possibly a new you architecture. Either way, it’s going to be a very ‘traditional’ PCI GPU.