14 DAY TRIAL // Present at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Intel has taken the opportunity to reveal more details about its upcoming super powerful Xeon Phi, which has been dubbed Knights Landing.
This isn't the first time Intel talked about this high-performance chip, as the part got put on display at the same event last year.
Back then we weren't told much about it, except for the fact that it would be manufactured using the 14 nanometer process mode and come equipped with integrated on-package memory.
Intel shed more light on the matter this year, saying Knights Landing will be based on Silvermont architecture and will be able to go as far as 3 teraflops. Furthermore, the chip giant also mentioned that Xeon Phi would take advantage of Omni Scale interconnect fabric.
For now not much info has been offered concerning Omni Scale, but the fabric is said to be different than the current True Scale that's found in Knights Corner, which is based on quad date rate (QDR) InfiniBand technology.
This scalable future-proof platform is supposed to allow support for basically anything including PCle adapter, edge switches, director systems and a whole host of open software tools. Intel hopes this combination will be able to solve the bottleneck issue.
Intel expects the market for supercomputing to increase in the coming years and with this aspect in mind it is already paving the way by announcing Knight’s Landing will be released next year to cater to the demands of this particular growing market.
The first Knights Landing chips will arrive with up to 16GB of on-package memory and is expected to offer three times the performance compared to Intel’s current Knights Corner Xeon Phi.
Intel also revealed the first supercomputer to be taking advantage of the Knights Landing architecture will be the “Cori,” a next-generation Cray XC system that will live at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
The supercomputer should go live by 2016 and cater to up to 5,000 users and 700 extreme-scale science projects. To get an idea of how massive the Cori will be, the supercomputer will be made up of more than 9,300 Intel Knights Landing.
Expect Knights Landing to start shipping out in commercially available HPC systems beginning with the second part of 2015.