I'm probably forgetting some vital details, but isn't that getting similar to Larrabee? As I recall that was where intel seemed to be exploring other uses for their Atom CPUs and were trying to push as many as they could into one processor.
One of the uses they prototyped was a GPU, or a large multi-threaded (x86)software renderer rather than going through a regular 3D acceleration API. I remember reading that part of the challenge was that Larrabee was a system itself, so a developer needed to boot something like BSD before providing it with code to get useful output. This was around the time AMD was experimenting with 'fusion' after their purchase of AMD, and exploring how to push different different parts of an application to the relevant processor in their CPU+GPU products.
That's in addition to the other Xeon Phi accelerators they did. Obviously Sierra Forest is a regular CPU, but it seems there's a bit of "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes"
One of the uses they prototyped was a GPU, or a large multi-threaded (x86)software renderer rather than going through a regular 3D acceleration API. I remember reading that part of the challenge was that Larrabee was a system itself, so a developer needed to boot something like BSD before providing it with code to get useful output. This was around the time AMD was experimenting with 'fusion' after their purchase of AMD, and exploring how to push different different parts of an application to the relevant processor in their CPU+GPU products.
That's in addition to the other Xeon Phi accelerators they did. Obviously Sierra Forest is a regular CPU, but it seems there's a bit of "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes"