Intel has stated that it will deliver the most efficient and programming-friendly platform for highly parallel applications. At a private briefing at SC11, Intel discussed the benefits of the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture in weather modeling, tomography, proteins folding and advanced materials simulation. The ahah moment occurred with they broke out a sample of the Knights Corner processor, the first commercial Intel MIC architecture product.
Intel has stated that it will deliver the most efficient and programming-friendly platform for highly parallel applications. At a private briefing at SC11, Intel discussed the benefits of the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture in weather modeling, tomography, proteins folding and advanced materials simulation. The ahah moment occurred with they broke out a sample of the Knights Corner processor, the first commercial Intel MIC architecture product.
Knights Corner is capable of delivering more than 1 TFLOPs of double precision floating point performance making it the first single processing chip capable of achieving such a performance level. Knights Corner will be manufactured using Intel’s latest 3-D Tri-Gate 22nm transistor process, which will include more than 50 cores. Don’t be surprised though if Intel downplays the cores count when the final specs are released. They really want people thinking about Knights Corner more along the lines of threads and more global capabilities, rather than an arbitrary core count.
One of the benefits of Intel MIC architecture is the ability to run existing applications without the need to port the code to a new programming environment. This will save a substantial amount of time, cost, and resources because users can use CPU and co-processor performance simultaneously with existing x86 based applications. Supercomputing groups were at the presentation, with Oak Ridge Laboratory reps practically salivating over the thought of next-generation processors going into the machines like Jaguar and Kraken, which reside in their facility in Tennessee.
Additional specs, pricing and availability have not been announced. However the Texas Advanced Computing Center did indicate they’re deploying Knights Corner in 2012 with full operation in 2013. And just for reference, here’s a great slide from the presentation comparing then and now.
