Intel Announces Xeon Phi Family of Co Processors - MIC Goes Retail
19 June 2012 Source: http://www.anandtech.com
As conference season is in full swing, this week’s big technical conference is the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) taking place over in Hamburg, Germany. ISC is one of the traditional venues for major supercomputing and high performance computing (HPC) announcements and this year is no exception. Several companies will be showing off their wares, but perhaps the biggest announcement of the week is from Intel. After having worked on the project for over half a decade in some form or another they’re finally ready to take a stab at the parallel computing market by bringing their first Many Integrated Core (MIC) product to market. Knights Corner, the codename for the first such product, will be the launch product for a brand new family of Intel co-processors, which the company is introducing as the Xeon Phi family.
As a bit of background on the subject, as many of our regular readers are aware Intel has been working for a while now on various high performance highly parallel CPU and GPU designs based on their x86 architecture. Initially intended to fill a gap in the High Performance Computing space where users have workloads that are highly parallel (as opposed to highly serial), these designs would be able to quickly tear through highly parallel workloads by using a large collection of small, simple x86 cores that would be far better suited to the task than the large, complex x86 cores that are necessary for a modern CPU.
The first and still most famous of these projects was Larrabee, which initially unveiled in 2008 was Intel’s first attempt at building such an HPC processor in the form of a graphics capable CPU. Larrabee was to be Intel’s answer to practically NVIDIA’s entire desktop GPU lineup, with Larrabee intended to confront GeForce on the graphics side and the then-fledgling Tesla on the HPC side, both served by a single processor similar to how NVIDIA uses the same GPUs in both Tesla and GeForce products. Larrabee of course never came to fruition, and in 2010 Intel canceled it while continuing their research into parallel processing.
Larrabee’s successor was named shortly thereafter under a new architecture called Many Integrated Core (MIC), which in many ways was a direct continuation from where Larrabee left off. MIC kept the concept of multiple simple X86 cores, but threw away any pretense of graphics in favor of focusing solely on HPC computing. Even at more than 2 years out from launch Intel already had a plan for MIC, announcing the codename of the first processor – Knights Corner – which would have 50+ cores and be manufactured on Intel’s 22nm process.