I imagine plugins would probably have to be coded with these in mind - as is currently the case with Nebula and CUDA. It seems feasible that Intel - who supply compilers etc - could perhaps make this a lot simpler by making it possible for DSP code that runs on vector processing units on current CPUs to run more easily on these massively parallel Knights Corner chips.Intel is planning to release two new Xeon Phi co-processor cards in May.
In addition to the already announced Xeon Phi 3100-series products due in the first half of the year, it seems that Chipzilla will also unveil new 5100- and 7100-series coprocessors starting this May.
There will be the Xeon Phi 5120D, 3120A, 3120P, 7120P and 7120X. It is not clear what the exact specs of co-processors will be but all of them are based on Knights Corner.
The Xeon Phi 3100-series was supposed to deliver over 1TFLOPS peak double precision performance, which is about as floppy as it gets at the moment. But the Xeon Phi 5120D, 7120P and 7120X coprocessors are even floppier. At present, Intel does not have exact shipment dates for the new products, but expects them to become generally available from May 1, 2013 to July 31, 2013.
The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 family is designed for a boffin on a budget as it can run compute-bound workloads such as life science applications and financial simulations. The Intel Xeon Phi 3100 family supports up to 6GB memory at 240GB/s bandwidth. It also has a series of reliability features including memory error correction codes (ECC).
The whole family will run at less than 300W thermal design point (TDP) envelope. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 will cost about $2000.
The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P features 60 cores with 4-way simultaneous multi-threading technology and 512KB L2 cache per core, provides additional performance at a lower power envelope.
It can manage 1.01TFLOPS double-precision performance with the wind behind it, and supports 8GB of GDDR5 memory at a higher 320 GB/sec memory bandwidth.
It needs 225 watts TDP, and is a passively cooled Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P. It is designed for denser computing environments such as the movie industry and energy research. You will be able to pick one of those up for $2,649.
At the price quoted, these aren't going to be for everybody but anyone who is currently using dual Xeons is already looking at a fairly expensive machine. Intel might not be interested in pricing these like "enthusiast" (gamers) graphics cards but that could be what is needed to find a market for video and audio types.