Intel axes the Xeon Phi Knights Hill

Last week Intel hired former AMD graphics head Raja Koduri as chief architect and revealed plans to make discrete video cards. Now the chip giant announces the cancellation of its Xeon Phi "Knights Hill", thereby putting an end to the Xeon Phi line that was assembled from the ashes of the failed Larrabee GPU.

Knights Hill was suppose to be made on a 10nm and was expected in 2018. The latest Intel roadmap calls for "a new platform and new microarchitecture specifically designed for exascale". No further details were revealed but presumably this product won't arrive until the 2020/2021 timeframe.

To meet our customers’ requirements and new timelines for global deployments of exascale, we are modifying our portfolio investment approach and accelerating technologies on the Intel high-performance computing roadmap. Intel has demonstrated the ability to enable efficient, multi-workload high-performance computing at scale across many different applications – and we’re excited about the technologies we’ll bring to bear to further democratize massive scale computing. One step we’re taking is to replace one of the future Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors (code name Knights Hill) with a new platform and new microarchitecture specifically designed for exascale. Combined with our comprehensive HPC solutions portfolio spanning compute, storage, I/O, and software, the updated roadmap is well poised to energize the exascale revolution.