Intel Larrabee has 32 Pentium-based cores?

German computer site Heise says Intel's Justin Rattner shared some interesting information about the Larrabee project at the Supercomputing conference in Dresden.

The reporter heard Intel's Larrabee will likely debut with 32 cores next year and one of the surprises is that these cores are based on the in-order architecture of the nearly 14-year old Pentium P54C - but with lots of modifications of course. The Larrabee cores will be made on a 45nm process, they'll have a 512-bit SIMD unit and Rattner confirmed the chips will support 64-bit.

Heise claims 32 Larrabee cores clocked at 2GHz could offer up to two teraFLOPS of computing power, that's twice as much as the latest video cards from AMD and NVIDIA offer today. However, the site also points out Larrabee may have a TDP of 300W, that's 64W more than the TDP of the GeForce GTX 280.