Cray has put together its own servers and supercomputers for years, and has also developed its own interconnects, chips and accelerators, said Jim McGregor, president of Tirias Research.

Intel will find it easier to link high-performance systems using Cray's assets, McGregor said. Intel dominates the server market with Xeon, and Cray's assets could help drive up performance while reducing power consumption.

"As we think of the evolution of the server, we're not just talking about what we can do between systems or chips. This could lead to technology that can be on a chip," McGregor said.

High-performance computing is an important segment of the server market, and one of the keys is to connect available processors through a fabric, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

Cray's assets could help bring together Intel's HPC products, which include specialized accelerator chips called MIC (many-integrated cores), Brookwood said. Intel's latest Xeon E5 and a 50-core MIC chip, code-named Knights Corner, are being paired in a supercomputer called Stampede, which will be deployed next year at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas.