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, Interesting)
I wonder if Intel is taking a page from IBM's playbook.
Upper end POWER7 CPUs have the ability to have half their cores turned off. The cores that are on can then use the disabled neighbor's caches, and run at a higher clock speed. For some things, this switch actually speeds up some tasks that can't be evenly broken up into balanced threads.
I can see Intel doing this where some cores are disabled due to manufacturing defects (which happen to all dies), and having the operable cores use nearby caching which would otherwise go to waste.
Re:Little Intel has growed up (Score:3, Interesting)
Below this point you have the problem of energy efficiency, i.e. whats the point of spending more energy on cooling than on actually powering the thing?
Intel's 3d-transistors are HUGE because of this, they can push higher clock speed more easily.