Larrabee lives! 50-core Intel Xeon Phi unveiled, lures supercomputers away from Nvidia Tesla

Larrabee lives! 50-core Intel Xeon Phi unveiled, lures supercomputers away from Nvidia Tesla

Intel has confirmed that each MIC core, like Larrabee, has a monstrous 16-wide ALU capable of 512-bit SIMD.



Intel is targeting real-world performance of 1 teraflops per coprocessor, which is well above the Tesla M2090 (a Fermi-based card) and AMD’s HD 7970. The key difference, though, is that Xeon Phi uses the mature and very-well-understood x86 architecture, and is supported by Intel’s best-in-class compiler toolchain. Nvidia’s Kepler-based Tesla cards might be faster than 1 teraflops — but that’s theoretical performance. The fact of the matter is that writing and compiling software to effectively use hundreds of CUDA cores is incredibly hard.