NVIDIA Doesn't See Intel Knights Ferry Accelerator as a Threat

Intel recently demonstrated the development platform for high-performance computing accelerators, known as Knights Ferry, but NVIDIA does not seem to be too worried about the progress said chip giant appears to be making.

Basically, Intel has been trying to create an HPC-only accelerator, one that is supposed to perform the same sort of tasks as NVIDIA's and AMD's GPU computing modules.

The most recent update on these efforts of Intel was made at the annual SC10 Supercomputer Expo, where it showed off the MIC (many Intel core) architecture.

Not long after, NVIDIA saw fit to state how it does not believe that Intel can truly make a competitive product of that sort without making a powerful GPU first.

GPUs have proven quite versatile when tasked with performing highly-parallelized code because they have many stream processors.

NVIDIA considers that it already has a head start as far as HPC-centric modules are concerned and thinks that Knights Ferry may be too far behind in that respect.

The company also thinks, or so says X-bit labs, that Intel has its work cut out for it if it wants to make HPC-exclusive modules without the financial backing from the graphics card market.

"It [Knights Corner] is so far out right now in terms of when it gets to production and when its gets to the market that I do not consider it to be a threat at this point," said Sumit Gupta, product manager at Nvidia's Tesla business unit, in an interview with X-bit labs.

"HPC is a [relatively] small market. We saw back in the past that HPC-only companies came and then vanished,” he added.

“We will see... We have a huge head-start, we have a product shipping, we have all these customers and deployments. Intel will try to catch up with us when it comes out with its product," he went on to saying.