14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may have decided to slowly move back from PCI Express card form factors to CPU packages when making Xeon Phy supercomputer processors, but there are still some add-in compute accelerators, and the high-end lineup is still made exclusively of such things, and that includes the one that is now approaching.
According to the Intel Xeon Phi Product Family Performance document published on Intel's website recently, the company is preparing a Xeon Phi 7120D card.
The high-end 71xx lineup is currently made of only PCI Express boards, two to be specific, called 7120P and 7120X.
The upcoming 7120D is also a PCI Express card, largely identical to the other two, which means it has 61 cores working at 1.238 GHz.
That's a lot of power, and it can go even higher when the Turbo Boost dynamic overclocking technology comes into play.
Between the cores and the 16 GB of on-package memory (5.5 GT/s effective speed), the newcomer should have an easy time crunching numbers.
As for what sets the 7120D apart from the other two, there are two things. First off, the card has a new package, in a PCB (printed circuit board) with a single edge connector.
It makes it compatible with PCI Express x24 slots. If you've never heard of such a thing, it's not surprising. Consumer PCs, and pretty much every other type of system other than those used in supercomputers, never go above PCI Express x16.
The other difference is the lack of a thermal solution. Presumably, the product is made for HPC designers that want to set up their own cooling arrays. It helps that the TDP is 10% lower than on the "P"/"X" models (270 W).
Sadly, the launch date and price of the Xeon Phi 7120D coprocessor are still very much unknown. We suspect that the release will come this quarter or the next though.