&gt; sort of a failed launch<p>Yeah.  But I think it&#x27;s good for Intel to follow through here instead of abandoning it like they did Larrabee.  Intel has some real design talent, so it would be great if they can get their software team and hardware team to work on a solution that competes well with GPUs.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help Phi that Intel&#x27;s OCL support isn&#x27;t quite there yet, IMO.<p>If they could just put their weight behind OCL and add their own extensions to support the cases where their accelerator design is different from GPUs, it would be attractive to HPC types to port their software to support it, IMO.<p>&gt; What are people using the Xeon Phi for?<p>I don&#x27;t know but I suspect it will shine for CPU-bound code that folks don&#x27;t want to waste time porting x86 executables to a new language&#x2F;framework.  Memory-bound stuff will probably not see an advantage over GPUs.  I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ll attract enough attention to TBB&#x2F;Cilk or whatever they&#x27;re promoting alongside Phi.