Stefan Mileschin

Chipzilla has announced its new version of Xeon Phi, otherwise known as Knight’s Landing which is a 72-core coprocessor solution manufactured on a 14nm process with 3D Tri-Gate transistors.

These use coprocessors built around Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that, just combine a whole bunch of cores into a single chip, which itself is part of a larger PCI-E add-in card solution for supercomputing applications.

Add-in cards run alongside engines just like NVIDIA’s Tesla GPU accelerators which can help with number crunching. Knight’s Landing is pretty good at supercomputing tasks, like working out how many years humanity has left in climate change simulations, genetic analysis, investment portfolio risk management and searching for new energy sources.

Knight’s Landing succeeds the current version of Xeon Phi, codenamed Knight’s Corner, which has up to 61 cores. Knight’s Landing has double-precision performance exceeding three teraflops and over 8 teraflops of single-precision performance. It also has 16GB of on-package MCDRAM memory, which Intel says is five times more power efficient as GDDR5 and three times as dense.

In making the announcement Charlie Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of HPC Platform Group at Intel said that supercomputing was entering a new era and being transformed from a tool for a specific problem to a general tool for many,”

“System-level innovations in processing, memory, software and fabric technologies are enabling system capabilities to be designed and optimised for different usages, from traditional HPC to the emerging world of big data analytics and everything in between. We believe the Intel Scalable System Framework is the path forward for designing and delivering the next generation of systems for the ‘HPC everywhere’ era.”

http://www.techeye.net/chips/intel-r...nights-landing