Intel Advances Technical Computing With New Xeon Phi Products

intel-knights-landing

Intel (INTC) continued to fuel its growth in technical computing Monday, with big announcements of new Xeon Phi products, and that its E5-2600 v2 processor product family and Phi coprocessors have helped catapult China's Tianhe-2 into the new number one position in the world for supercomputers. More than 80 percent of the current most powerful supercomputers in the world are powered by Intel processors.

New Phi Coprocessor Products

New Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor products were announced, to provide what Intel refers to as neo-heterogeneity - a heterogeneous system with a single programming model. Intel announced the expansion of its current generation Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors with the addition of five new products that feature various performance options, memory capacity, power efficiency and form factors that are available immediately.

At the top end of Phi coprocessors is the 7100 family, with 61 cores clocked at 1.23GHz, 16GB of memory and over 1.2 teraflops of double precision performance. The Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 family is designed for high performance per dollar value, and features 57 cores clocked at 1.1 GHz and 1 teraflops of double precision performance. Intel also added another product to the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5100 family announced last year. Named the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5120D, it is optimized for high-density environments with the ability to allow sockets to attach directly to a mini-board for use in blade form factors.

"Intel is helping to blaze a path toward new innovation, discovery and competitiveness with its supercomputing vision and products," said Raj Hazra, vice president and general manager of Technical Computing Group. "There is an insatiable demand for more computing power while also achieving new levels of power efficiency. With the current and future generations of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, Intel Xeon processors, Intel TrueScale fabrics and software, Intel is uniquely equipped to deliver a comprehensive solution for our customers without compromise."

Knights Landing

After a successful launch of the Xeon Phi coprocessor last year, Intel will evolve the product into its second generation, code named Xeon Phi Knights Landing. The new chip will use a 14nm process and be offered as either a host processor (CPU) or coprocessor. As a PCIe card-based coprocessor, "Knights Landing" will handle offload workloads from the system's Intel Xeon processors and provide an upgrade path for users of current generation of coprocessors, much like it does today. As a stand alone host processor it will enable the next leap in compute density and performance per watt, handling all the duties of the primary processor and the specialized coprocessor at the same time.