An item over at the Inquirer said that at the E3 they were unofficially informed that Intel is working on getting back into the games graphics market. This was in May.

In July we have the following item over at the Inquirer in which Intel reveals their G965 graphics solution, which is using technology licensed from PowerVR, back then codenamed Eurasia and now known as GSX (Graphics Shader Accelerator. Now furthermore the article tells us that Intel will also start work on using Muse (Media Unified Shading Engine) for its graphics offering. Simplistically compare Muse to what Cell did, cheap cores in a parellel setup thus enabling improved calculations. In this case with multiple GSX cores (due to the Universal Scalable Shader Engine I think, which combines the pixel and vertex shaders into one design) it might even build a multi-pipeline graphics solution. The only funny thing is that Wikipedia's PowerVR article lists Muse as a mobile solution according to a company presentation. And indeed, when one checks another article at the Inquirer you see that the roadmap indeed introduces Muse and Athena, the first aimed at portable computing, the latter aimed at desktops (introducing programmable shaders). Of course, if the GSX is a SoC design the lower energy consumption and die size (and gate count)

Funnily enough on the Intel site right now there are two job openings (posted end of July and early August) in the United States for a Senior Graphics Software Engineer and Software Engineer 3D Graphics. The first focusing on what seems to be identify from the end-user (including game developers) point of view where the bottlenecks in the hardware design lie. The latter job seems to focus on driver improvements and driver support for OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 10. Coincedence?