Intel and Cray, which when last seen was exclusively an AMD house and a feather in AMD’s cap, are now going to work together on HPC and Cray’s going to use the multi-core Xeon and fancy interconnect developments in future Cray servers, apparently starting in the so-called Cascade timeframe, say, 2010-2012.

They’re talking about tackling “fundamental and historical problems of science and industry” and they plan to develop a range of HPC systems and technologies over the next few years.

The alliance, a choice of one roadmap over another, can be laid to AMD screwing up the Barcelona quad chip and delaying Barcelonaa’s Budapest follow-on, which impacted Cray deliveries, not to mention how far behind Intel AMD has fallen and doubts about its staying power.

The object of the Cascade project, funded by DARPA and meant to be built on AMD technologies, is to build HPC systems that are more broadly applicable, easier to program and more resistant to failure than what you can get nowadays. It’s supposed to use a lot of task-specific co-processors.

Cray, which gave AMD bragging rights because three of its AMD-based boxes are among the top 10 machines in the world, will continue to use AMD in its current and pre-Cascade machines.