Archean
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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.
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.
