• Many smaller lower power Intel processor cores
• Wider vector processing units for greater (generally) floating point performance/watt

• Higher aggregate performance
• Supports Data Parallel, Thread Parallel, Process Parallel
• Higher memory bandwidth

• Standards-based: C/C++/FORTRAN
• Abstract: no requirement to program to the underlying hardware
• More than an accelerator: fully addressable, independent node in a cluster
• Full support by Intel® Cluster Studio XE

Leading development suite for great application performance

Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2013 combines industry-leading compilers, performance and parallel libraries, error checking, and performance profiling tools for C, C++ and Fortran. 

Efficiently boost application performance with Intel® Parallel Studio XE. This must have package of developer tools includes the industry's best optimizing C and C++ compilers , and Fortran compilers , new programmability innovations, high-performance libraries, new threading assistant , next generation of profiling, and code reliability tools. Single-language C++ and Fortran versions of Studio XE are available.

Intel® Cluster Studio XE 2013

The ultimate HPC cluster development suite

Intel® Cluster Studio XE 2013 includes all components from Intel Parallel Studio XE, plus Intel® MPI tools. This suite enables software developers to boost performance on multicore, many-core, and cluster systems.

HPC cluster compute capacity is scaling at twice the rate of Moore's Law.  Intel® Cluster Studio XE is the first comprehensive HPC cluster development suite that scales MPI application performance, capacity, and development efficiency for multicore and many-core systems

Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE 2013

Advanced threading and performance profiler

Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE is a performance and thread profiler for C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, and MPI developers.  New pre-sets deliver easier ‟point and shoot” profiling set up.  A threading timeline, data filtering, frame analysis, and source display make it easier to tune your application to fully utilize today and tomorrow's processors.

Intel® Advisor XE 2013

Innovative threading assistant - New!  Now available for Linux!

Intel® Advisor XE is a threading assistant for C, C++, C#, and Fortran developers.  It finds regions with the greatest performance potential from parallelism and identifies critical synchronization issues.  Evaluate alternatives before investing in implementation.  Estimate the speedup and identify correctness issues.  Select the options with the best return on investment.