The supercomputer race has cooled down considerably, courtesy of an unbeatable Tianhe-2 that has crushed the competition in six consecutive editions of the Top500 list. Still, changes are expected next year, and they will inevitably come through Intel hardware. This is how the next generation of Xeon Phi processors, under the name Knight's Landing, appears on the radar. The new chips raise the number of cores to 72, eleven more than the previous models.
There is a dimension beyond desktop computers and mobile devices. In that dimension, performance is everything, and it demands the best the industry has to offer. Over the past few years, the trend has been very clear: Intel is at the helm of high-performance computing. You only need to look at the specifications of the Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2, which doubles the performance of its immediate rival Titan. But the landscape is about to change very soon. Last April we reported that Intel cannot sell its hardware to the Chinese government for national security reasons, but that does not prevent the Santa Clara giant from continuing its development.
The next generation: Knight's Landing
This brings us to the new generation of Xeon Phi processors, codenamed Knight's Landing. The most relevant fact is the number of cores in the new chips. The first commercial version of Xeon Phi (Knight's Corner) offers a maximum of 61 cores with a 22-nanometer construction, but the new Knight's Landing will pack 72 cores per chip, utilizing a 14-nanometer design. To this we must add the implementation of new technologies such as MCDRAM (Multi-Channel DRAM), a stacked memory variant that Intel and Micron are developing together. Micron will provide the MCDRAM modules, and it is estimated that the bandwidth will rise to 500 gigabytes per second, 50 percent more than what Knight's Corner delivers.
There is still no information about the companies that will seek to acquire this new hardware, but the US Department of Energy has confirmed that it will use the new Xeon Phi in Cori, a supercomputer with 9,300 cores that will come online during the second half of next year. What can these chips really do? The numbers speak of three teraflops in double precision and eight in single precision. We can't wait to see them in supercomputers.
