Intel made the announcement during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany, stating that it will soon deliver new products based its Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that will create platforms running “at trillions of calculations per second”, while also retaining the benefits, namely x86 compatibility, of standard Intel processors. MIC has its origins in Intel’s Terascale project, which reached 80 cores on one processor, 48 cores in a “single-chip cloud computer”, delivered a performance of up to 2 TFlops and provided technology to Larrabee, which was once planned to result in an x86-based graphics card and floating point accelerator card.

The first product are “Knights Ferry” add-in boards cards that are currently “shipping to select developers.” In the second half of 2010, the program will offer “an extensive range of developer tools for Intel MIC architecture,” the company said. Knights Ferry will have 32 cores, each running at 1.2 GHz. The device will have 8 MB coherent cache 1 or 2 GB of GDDR5 memory and run 128 threads (4 threads per core).

Further down the road, Intel plans a 50+ core product code-named Knights Corner, which will use a 22 nm manufacturing process. Since 22 nm products will not be available until very late 2011, it is reasonable to assume that Knights Corner will be a 2012 or later product.

In effect, Intel’s announcement is not an entirely new strategy, but a change of communication as Larrabee was always intended to become a floating point accelerator as well. The targets, however, are not Nvidia’s and AMD’s graphics cards anymore, but Nvidia’s Tesla, AMD’s ATI FireSteam GPU accelerators as well as Clearspeed’s accelerator boards.

Intel is expected to continue on the x86 route to attract developers.

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