Intel announces new Xeon Phi-generation processors

Intel announced its latest generation of Xeon Phi processors on the first day of the International Supercomputing Conference. The Knights Landing generation also gets a new onboard interconnect, the Omni Scale fabric.

The announcement about the new Xeon Phi generation is still a bit meager: just like with the previous Xeon Phi announcements, Intel only releases sparse information. The company has indicated that the new Xeon Phi generation, codenamed Knights Landing, will have at least as many computing cores as the current generation. This brings the number of cores to sixty or more. These will be Silvermont cores adapted for hpc calculations: at what clock speed those Atom cores run is unknown. Nor is it known what adjustments have been made to make the cores more suitable for hpc purposes.

It is known that the Knights Landing generation will achieve a computing power of at least 3Tflops double precision each. The current generation of Knights Corner can only hit 1.2Tflops. The chips get 16GB of high-bandwidth, low-latency memory on board. Intel did not let go of more than the report that the memory was developed with Micron and is faster and more economical than DDR4 memory. Knights Landing will be available in both a PCIe plug-in and socketed version and should be available in the second half of 2015.

The Knights Landing generation gets Intel’s new interconnect technology on board. This Omni Scale fabric is an upgrade of the True Scale fabric and connects with silicon photonics cables. The fabric will also be integrated into future generations of 14nm Xeon processors. In addition, Omni Scale should be available as PCIe cards and switches, and the technology would be largely compatible with current True Scale fabrics.