Cray will continue to develop Cascade, and its supercomputer road map will remain intact, the company said. Cray also sells servers starting at $200,000, and the company will continue to sell servers and storage products.

"The acquisition of Cray's industry-leading interconnect technology and expertise provides exceptional strategic assets that further enhance Intel's HPC portfolio," said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected System Group, in the statement.

Intel is looking to build up its high-performance-computing portfolio through faster processors and quicker interconnects. The company in July bought networking vendor Fulcrum Systems to build its data center portfolio, and in January acquired InfiniBand assets from Qlogic in a cash transaction worth US$125 million. Intel is building a chip-to-chip and server interconnect based on Qlogic's Infiniband assets.