Intel announced a new brand for all of its future “many integrated core” (MIC) processors for high-performance computing (HPC) in its Xeon family of products.

The new brand is Xeon Phi, and products branded as such will be optimized to deliver high-level parallel-processing performance, Rajeeb Hazra, VP of Intel’s Architecture Group and general manager for technical computing, said.

Hazra said Intel expected Xeon Phi to become “the workhorse of parallel computing of the future.”

While MIC was an “interesting architecture name,” he explained, it was not “necessary attractive as an external brand.” Intel is not planning to retire MIC, as a name, but will continue using it for appropriate audiences.

Hazra said the first commercial product from the Phi family, codenamed “Knights Corner”, would be available by the end of 2012. The architecture is ready for cluster-based experimental deployments, he said.

Knights Corner is able to use more than 50 processor cores in parallel for standard Intel programming and software tools. This will be a coprocessor, compatible with x86 programming models, running as an HPC-optimized, highly parallel, separate compute node with its own Linux-based operating system independent of the operating system of the host.

This feature, Intel says, provides greater flexibility in cluster implementations than the alternative graphics accelerator-based technologies.

HPC is a major growth area for Intel and therefore enjoys a lot of investment by the processor maker, Hazra said. It is one of the three fastest growing and most important segments of the data center market for the company, the other two being cloud and networking.

Intel expects the HPC market to grow 20% per year between 2011 and 2016, the cloud market to grow 25% per year and the network market to grow 30% per year.