Intel Reveals New Details Of Exascale Supercomputing Chip
Intel’s first generation Xeon microprocessors are currently the most popular calculating engines for conventional servers and supercomputers.
As we add Intel Xeon Phi products to our portfolio, scientists, engineers and IT professionals will experience breakthrough levels of performance to effectively address challenges ranging from climate change to risk management, said Raj Hazra, Intel Corporation VP and general manager of the Technical Computing at Data Center and Connected Systems Group.
This is the next step of Intel’s commitment to achieve exascale-level computation by 2018, and create a unique technology category that delivers unprecedented performance for today’s highly parallel applications.
The new Xeon Phi processors are expected to be available by the end of the year.
In addition to their compatibility with x86 programming models, the chips will be visible to applications as an HPC-optimized, highly-parallel, separate compute node that runs its own Linux-based operating system independent of the host OS, Intel said. In other words, the chips will work to speed up the fastest clusters by working as a
co-processor in conjunction with a server CPU to accelerate workloads.
The Xeon Phi uses Intel’s 22nm, 3-D tri-gate transistors, and contains more than 50 cores and a minimum of 8GB of GDDR5 memory, Intel said.
Last year Intel demonstrated the single Knights Corner coprocessor delivering over 1 TeraFLOPs (1 trillion floating point operations per second) of double precision real life performance. By comparison, in 1997, it took more than 9000 Intel Pentium processors inside the ASCII RED supercomputer to break the 1 TeraFLOPs milestone.
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