Announcement of the co-processors Intel Xeon Phi

During the event, International Supercomputing Conference, Intel announced a brand Intel Xeon Phi, which will be used to refer to all future products on the architecture of Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture (Intel MIC). Deliveries of the first such product shall commence before the end of this year. The first will be a family of co-processors under the symbol Knights Corner. As conceived by Intel, it will complement the family of CPUs, and Intel Xeon E5-2600/4600 will improve performance on tasks with a high degree of parallelism. The first generation of Intel Xeon Phi products will be focused on the use of supercomputers, but in the future, the manufacturer also expects to reach segments of the corporate VC and workstations.

 

The advantages of the Knights Corner Company considers the use of a familiar programming model for developers and compatibility with the tools to develop software for the architecture of Intel.

Co-processors Intel Xeon Phi will not only compatible with the software architecture models, x86, but can also be seen as separate applications to compute nodes, running its own OS based on Linux, regardless of the primary operating system and optimized for parallel computing. According to the manufacturer, it offers a high degree of flexibility in creating clusters, unattainable in the case of decisions based on the GPU.

 

Coprocessor is an expansion card for the bus PCI Express. It is a 22-nanometer chip, "with more than 50 kernels" , in the possession of which is "not less than 8 GB of memory GDDR5». Last year, Intel demonstrated a working one coprocessor Knights Corner , whose performance on the double-precision operations over 1 TFLOPS.

Although the serial products appear only at the end of the year, according to Intel, the first cluster based on Intel Xeon Phi 150 runs and took a position in the list of high-performance computers in the world Top500.