Intel has provided more information about the capabilities and specifications of its Knight's Landing Xeon Phi (co)processors. Tech site WCCF Tech is hosting an Intel produced PDF document which was released to provide supplementary info for the 2015 Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The document outlines some spectacularly beefy processors Intel is going to produce as part of its professional Xeon Phi range.
Above you can see a slide which describes a 72 Silvermont core Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. The coprocessor supports 6 channels of DDR4 2400 up to 384GB and can have up to 16GB of HBM on board. It supports 36 PCIe Gen 3 lanes. In internal testing the new Knights Landing processors and coprocessors are up to three times faster in single threaded performance and up to three times more power efficient.
The Knights Landing chips will be the bedrock of Intel's future enterprise architecture for high performance parallel computing. How the chips work to advance computing in a balanced way requires a partnership of the new hardware, as shown in the above diagram, and properly written software.
Intel is marketing its Xeon Phi coprocessors to compete against the GPU-based parallel processing solutions from the likes of Nvidia and AMD, that have come to dominate high performance, energy efficient parallel computing. Intel's x86 solution is said to offer ease of use and familiarity to developers but both AMD and Nvidia are said to be improving their software / development offerings too.
