Intel's Xeon Phi targeted at exacomputing

A chip code-named Knights Corner will be the first Xeon Phi processor released by Intel later this year. Targeted at supercomputers, Knights Corner will have more than 50 cores and deliver power consumption breakthroughs while scaling performance when conducting complex calculations, said Rajeeb Hazra, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of technical computing.

The next big milestone for supercomputers is to reach exaflop performance, which would be about 100 times as fast as today's fastest computers. Chip makers Intel and Nvidia are in a race to claim the lead in exaflop computing by building specialized chips that can execute more calculations per second while keeping power consumption in check. Supercomputers are now harnessing the parallel-processing capabilities of these graphics processors and chips like Phi to perform complex calculations tied to scientific and math research.

The Xeon Phi chips will be part of the Xeon server chip family, which is used in a majority of industry-standard servers to process cloud and database applications. Intel has acquired a host of fabric technologies from companies like Qlogic and Cray to provide the bandwidth to shuttle data in supercomputers.

Phi chips are viewed as Intel's answer to Nvidia's Tesla graphics processors, which pack in hundreds of computing cores and are already being used in the world's fastest supercomputers. The world's second-fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China, combines Nvidia's Tesla GPUs with Intel's Xeon CPUs to deliver 2.5 petaflops of performance. Nvidia's graphics processors are also being installed in the Titan supercomputer alongside CPUs from Advanced Micro Devices at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which is expected to deliver more than 10 petaflops of peak performance.

Intel calls the first Xeon Phi chip a co-processor, as it needs a server CPU such as the Xeon E5 to work on computer systems. The Phi chip will be used in a supercomputer called Stampede, which could go live as early as the end of this year at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas. The supercomputer will deliver peak performance of 10 petaflops (or 10,000 trillion operations per second). The E5 processors will take on 20 percent of the supercomputer's performance, while Knights Corner will handle 80 percent of the load.