Intel is angling to get a piece of the pie that video cards are currently enjoying as the GPGPU trend continues to grow. GPGPU, or general processing on a graphics processing unit, uses the GPU on a computer’s dedicated graphics card to do additional processing in parallel. GPUs are particularly well suited for floating point operations and their applications can range from grid computing, supercomputers, and security implementations.
Intel’s Xeon Phi sports 61 cores on a PCI-Express card that takes up two slots. It is able to handle 244 threads with 8GB of RAM and up to 320 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The Xeon Phi co-processor, codenamed Knights Corner, uses 22nm processes and uses the first 3D tri-gate transistors. The current model is listed as 5110p. I would say it should be able to run Crysis 2, 3, 4, and so on but it only runs on Linux.
For more information, you can view the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor presentation, read its Software Developers Guide. The first Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) product also has an article in the Intel Software Library and its own page where you can learn more about how core density for a server rack can increase to 7x with these devices.
