Posted on Tuesday, November 26 2013 @ 16:23 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel announced that its upcoming Xeon Phi "Knights Landing" will no longer be a co-processor but an all-in-one solution that combines a CPU with an accelerator. The new model will feature scalar processor cores and vector processor cores on the same silicon with unified memory acces. Full details
at IT World.
But now, with Intel's Knights Landing, there won't be a need to build servers with Xeon processors and Xeon Phi co-processor cards. The Knight's Landing generation will be its own processor, so there will be no more need to cram the Xeon Phi cards into the server box. Those cards were the size of a high-end GPU, which meant a lot of hardware jammed into the box and a lot of heat.
Much more important is what else it takes away. Knight's Landing will erasing the memory buffer and PCI Express bus that sat between the CPU and main memory and the coprocessor chip and frame buffer memory in the Xeon Phi card. Now that applications run entirely natively instead of offloading the data sets to the coprocessor, all of that latency goes away.
