Intel Introduces Xeon Phi Product Line

Intel announced its latest product line at the International Supercomputing Conference 2012 in Hamburg. The Xeon Phi series processors should become the driving force of supercomputers in the near future.

The Xeon Phi brand was formally introduced on Monday by Rajeb Hazra, Intel’s new chief executive of the Architecture Group. The first product under the new banner is the Xeon Phi Coprocessor, a ‘video card’ with Xeon technology on board. Intel does not provide details about the hardware, but confirms that the GPU card has more than fifty cores. Those cores, unlike Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs with which Knights Corner competes, are compatible with x86 code. That should make programming easy. The coprocessors are produced using the same 22nm process with trigate transistors as Ivy Bridge.

A single Knights Corner card would score well over a teraflop in Linpack benchmarks. The first experimental supercomputer with the new coprocessor has already made it to the supercomputer top 500, a new list of which was also published Monday. That Discovery computer uses nodes in which a single Knights Corner card interacts with two Xeon E5 processors, to collectively hit 118tflops. The computer has not yet been tweaked, Intel emphasizes, so that performance can be improved in the long run. The total number of Xeon E5-2670 cores is 9800 pieces.

The coprocessor, which will be available as a PCI Express card with x8 interface, should be available before the end of the year. Knights Corner will then be up against Nvidia’s K20, with Kepler architecture. Knights Corner will be available as a passively cooled card, with the server providing the necessary cooling, or as an actively cooled card. The card has 8GB GDDR5 memory on board.

Several manufacturers have announced that they will be marketing systems with the Xeon Phi Coprocessor. HP, Dell and Acer, among others, release servers with Knights Corner. Cray, manufacturer of fast interconnects for supercomputers, also supports the new products.