Intel Announces Xeon E5 and Knights Corner HPC Chip 122
MojoKid writes "At the supercomputing conference SC2011 yesterday, Intel announced its new Xeon E5 processors and demoed their new Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution. The new Xeons won't be broadly available until the first half of 2012, but Intel has been shipping the new chips to a small number of cloud and HPC customers since September. The new E5 family is based on the same core as the Core i7-3960X Intel launched Monday. The E5, while important to Intel's overall server lineup, isn't as interesting as the public debut of Knights Corner. Recall that Intel's canceled GPU (codenamed Larrabee) found new life as the prototype device for future HPC accelerators and complementary products. According to Intel, Knights Corner packs 50 x86 processor cores into a single die built on 22nm technology. The chip is capable of delivering up to 1TFlop of sustained performance in double-precision floating point code and operates at 1 — 1.2GHz. NVIDIA's current high-end M2090 Tesla GPU, in contrast, is capable of just 665 DP GFlops."
Re:Little Intel has growed up (Score:4, Informative)
Once it became clear that that particular plan wasn't a happening thing, and that AMD was delivering serious server parts and knockdown prices, and Nvidia was doing interesting things with GPUs, and ARM licensees were pumping out increasingly zippy low-end chips, they stopped fucking around. These days they'll still charge as hard as they can for the features provided; but their hopes of sandbagging x86s in order to sell IA64s are dead
Re:Little Intel has growed up (Score:4, Informative)
Your average consumer doesn't need 50 cores.
Sure they do. What do you think a GPU is? History has shown over and over that we can never have enough computing power. Now that we're at the physical limits of clock speeds, parallelism is going mainstream.
Re:Little Intel has growed up (Score:5, Informative)
Because computers count in binary, which is powers of two. And, I'll assume you meant cores.
Historically such things have been powers of two to make the addressing simpler without having extra magic or control lines left over. So, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 all make sense in terms of being expressable in a fixed number of bits ... 50 to some of us seems like a fairly arbitrary choice. Since you use an unusual combination of wiring, it might as well be 37 or 51 since it's not a number that 'naturally' lends itself to computers. The device is likely wired in such a way that it could count to 64 ... or they're doing things in a slightly odd way.
Anyway, that's why some of us find it to be a little odd. And it's also why the hard-drive makers deciding "1 GIG" is "1,000,000,000 bytes" is irksome ... with all of those extra powers of two, it should be "1 073 741 824 bytes". Which means you lose about 72MB/GIG ... so my 2TB drive isn't.
MIC presentations at SC11 (Score:4, Informative)
I'm at SC11 right now and just attended NIC's MIC presentation. The scaling looks fantastic according to various codes that they compiled to run on it, but what was notably absent was performance relative to traditional x86 chips. The final presenter even said that now that the technology has been demonstrated to work (with minimal porting effort required) the next step will be to optimize and improve performance. The take away is that relative to Intel's other chips, MIC performance wasn't impressive enough to include in the presentation. That's fine in my book because it's an ambitious project, but it sounds like there is still some work to do.