Intel says it's going to put $12 million over five years into a new visual computing research center that just opened at Saarland University in Germany. The amount of the investment, just as Intel is working on Larrabee - its first graphics chip in years - will be its largest collaboration with a European university. It's expected to contribute to Intel's many-core tera-scale research intended to produce higher-performance computing and more life-like graphics. The center is to do both basic and applied research in software design and architecture, algorithms, and parallel computing, employing maybe a dozen researchers by the end of the year from places like Intel, the Max Plank Institute for Informatics, the Max Plank Institute for Software Systems, and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. It will be reaching out to other academic and industry partners to grow to 60 people.