Although Intel drove another nail into the coffin of its Larrabee discrete GPU project last week, the architecture itself is very much alive. A variant of the architecture is being used for High Performance Computing applications and it's said to leverage both Larrabee and Intel's many cores research projects. Called the Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, it will first appear in a 22nm product codenamed Knights Corner that scales to more than 50 processing cores.
MIC-based products will be aimed at segments such as exploration, scientific research and financial or climate simulation, and although a majority of applications will still run best on the company Xeon server processors, MIC chips will "help accelerate select highly parallel applications," Intel said in a press release today.
The chipmaker hasn't provided a release date, but it's currently shipping development kits codenamed "Knights Ferry" to select industry players. In the second half of this year, the company will deliver an "extensive range of developer tools" for its MIC architecture.