Intel's gettin' kinda heavy, it's got the power, gonna break your heart

Intel spent most of yesterday standing in the bar at the SC11 conference showing off the size of its computing prowess. Admittedly, it's on a roll; the Xeon E5 processor powers ten of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, and Intel chips as a whole are found inside 85 percent of all the machines on the list -- not to mention the E5's newly minted PCI Express 3.0 compatibility. The Santa Clara chip maker is also building a new Exascale lab at the Barcelona Computing Center, a ten petaflop "Stampede" machine at the Texas ACS and several other machines for Government agencies like NASA. The Seattle shindig was a great excuse for Intel's Rajeeb Hazra to show off the new Knights Corner co-processor, built with a new Tri-Gate 3D 22nm process that packs 50 cores into one strip of silicon. In fact, the only thing Intel wasn't bragging about was being bested by the record breaking Fujitsu K, the mere mention of which caused everyone to go a little bit too quiet and begin to glower (we assume).