Intel Corp (INTC)

[kpf]

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Let's face it - it's a niche product right now

Hmm. If you consider HPC as a niche...

At any rate, he's not looking to compete with Intel, but rather to complement Intel hardware.

Hmm. Yes and no. I could easily imagine Xeon-Systems partnered with Clearspeed Silicon to build 32-bit HPC-Clusters and Workstations for scientific appliances.
The dilemma is, such systems would be cheap and performant enough to be a hell of a threat to Itanium. For this reason, if we will see such systems next year or so, I dont expect them to come from Intel....

Anyway, the approach to combine "commodity"-Silicon with Coprocessors for HPC is the way tomorrow's supercomputers will be built imo. Not sure the Clearspeed-product announced is what it takes though - 64-bit and Hypertransport-bus is what it would take e.g.) Hope somebody will come up with such a thing. K.


K.