14 DAY TRIAL // Intel said that it was moving from PCI Express card to LGA CPU in its design of Xeon Phi coprocessors, but the PCI Express collection isn't likely to completely disappear any time soon, perhaps never if the appearance of the 7120A is anything to go by.
Intel said that it was phasing out the PCI Express form factor of the Xeon Phi series all the way back in November 2013.
Yet here we are, in March 2014, and the company is still making add-in cards. Compute accelerators as it were, parallel processing boards for supercomputers.
Anyway, the newest coprocessor is called Xeon Phi 7120A and is based on the Knights Corner architecture, which, in turn, is based on the 22nm manufacturing process technology.
As some may have been too wary to hope, the card has 61 cores. That's right, this is a version of that altogether overpowered compute accelerator that the world caught wind of a few months back.
The 61 cores can run 244 threads at once, and the core clock is of 1.238 GHz, unless the Turbo feature comes in, in which case it rises to 1.333 GHz.
We'll let you figure out for yourselves what it means for 61 cores to do that, each, all at the same time. The Xeon Phi 7120A also has 16 GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 5.5 GHz (GT/s).
All this runs on 300 Watts, which is a high TDP (thermal design power) if ever there was one. Bigger than for most graphics cards really. It's a good thing that supercomputers have a lot of power available.
It's also a good thing that system modules don't have all that many PCI Express x6 slots available for coprocessors to plug into. Well, the HPC designers who want as much performance as possible might disagree, but those who advocate energy efficiency probably don't mind.
Of course, when it comes to HPC installation, the cooling technology usually ends up accounting for a large part of the cost of ownership, so the COT and efficiency concerns probably fall more under the purview of the cooling providers.
Anyway, the Xeon Phi 7120A could be considered a sort of little brother to the Xeon Phi 7120D, 7120P and 7120X, which support PCI Express x24.
This is what the release roadmap looks like, according to information gathered from the "Xeon Phi Product Family Performance" document published by Intel back in January, and info from CPU World: the 7120D will come out this quarter (so, by the end of March), while the 7120A we've covered today will be ready in the second one.