14 DAY TRIAL // By now it think that every computer enthusiast out there has grown accustomed to Intel's “tick-tock” processor development strategy that calls for a lower manufacturing process to be used ahead of any architecture update, but Intel said this won't be the case anymore when it comes to its MIC (many integrated core) chips that target the HPC environment.
Build as an alternative to Nvidia's Tesla and AMD's FireStream computing processors, the MIC architecture is based on the work done for the Larabee project.
Designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, this micro-architecture will use a great number of x86 cores in order to provide acceleration for highly parallel tasks such as video encoding, rendering, weather modeling and other such workloads.
Although all these were pretty much known facts, Intel has recently stated that they are going to drop the “tick-tock” development cycle for MIC products since their rivals, namely Nvidia and AMD, don't introduce such solutions every 12 months.
Furthermore, HPC customers are usually interested in performance and not in costs, so releasing new solutions that don't bring any major performance increases from generation to generation won't appeal to them.
As a result, MIC solutions will be updated once in eighteen or even twenty four months, but "each processor update could encapsulate more significant architectural changes", according to Rajeeb Hazra, the general manager of the high performance computing group at Intel who was cited by HPCwire.
The first Intel MIC products are expected to see the light of day sometime in 2011 under the Knights Corner code name and will feature more than fifty basic x86 cores made using 22nm fabrication process.
Intel expects their solution to gain wide market acceptance thanks to their x86 cores that enable developers to easily port applications to these upcoming MIC accelerators. (via Xbitlabs)