Intel releases Knight’s Landing

Known as the Knights Landing version of a Xeon Phi chip, Intel says it will be shipping a select number of workstations that are built around the monstrous chip, as soon as 2016. In turn, suggests Intel’s Charles Wuischpard to the website, PC makers may more widely adopt the company’s supercomputer silicon in desktop models. The U.S. Department of Energy, however, said that the chip will be used in Cori, a 9,300-core supercomputer that will be deployed in the latter half of 2016 at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, California.

The older version of Xeon Phi chips are used in the current fastest supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2, which is installed in mainland China, CIO reported.

As PCWorld explains it, the Knights Landing CPUs will be loaded into the workstations individually as an add-in card, and will handle background tasks like the operating system’s maintenance, as well as providing a few assistance to improve application performance.

The workstation will also include preloaded programming tools and other software programs.

The 14nm coprocessors, code-named Knights Landing, aim to squeeze more performance out of supercomputers while maintaining a unified environment. Moreover, the chip has been compared to have the same performance range as of a few graphics chips used in the fastest supercomputers in the world today.

In addition Intel also claims to support Double-precision, which is very important for co-processors as it is vital in the fields of supercomputing due to the higher accuracy rates in floating-point calculations than single-precision calculations.

As an example of how Kights Landing’s inherent power will enhance computing power, it comes with 16GB of on-package MCDRAM memory. As a foundational element of the Intel SSF, Intel introduced the Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA), a new HPC-optimized fabric technology that makes the performance of HPC clusters more accessible to a broader variety of users.

The Xeon Phi processor is also a springboard for new memory, I/O and storage technologies destined to reach in the short term, commercial markets such as desktops and laptops. Colfax, Cray, Dell, Fujitsu Systems Europe, Hitachi, Huawei, HPE, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro and other system vendors starting to announce Intel OPA-based switches and server platforms, with volume shipments ramping in the first quarter of next year.