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Intel christens its 'Many Integrated Core' products Xeon Phi, eyes exascale milestone
Been wondering when the next big leap in high performance computing would hit? Well, Intel would like you to believe the time is now and the name of that revolution is the Xeon Phi. Formerly codenamed Knights Corner, the Many Integrated Core product is pushing the field of supercomputers into the era of the exaflop by squeezing a teraflop of performance into a package small enough to plug into a PCIe slot. The Phi brand will, at first at least, be applied to specialized coprocessors designed for highly parallel tasks. The chips are built using Intel's 22nm manufacturing process and 3-D TriGate transistors, piling in more that 50 cores in an effort to combat the inroads made by GPU companies like NVIDIA in the supercomputing space. For more info check out the presentation (PDF) and blog post at the source links.
Intel plans exascale computing by 2018, wants to make petaflops passé
Sure, Fujitsu has a right to be proud of its K supercomputer -- performing over 8 petaflops with just under 70,000 Venus CPUs is nothing to sneeze at. Intel isn't giving up its status as the supercomputing CPU king, however, as it plans to bring exascale computing to the world by the end of this decade. Such a machine could do one million trillion calculations per second, and Intel plans to make it happen with its Many Integrated Core Architecture (MIC). The first CPUs designed with MIC, codenamed Knights Corner, are built on a 22nm process that utilizes the company's 3D Tri-Gate transistors and packs over 50 cores per chip. These CPUs are designed for parallel processing applications, similar to the NVIDIA GPUs that will be used in a DARPA-funded supercomputer we learned about last year. Here we thought the war between these two was over -- looks like a new one's just getting started. PR's after the break.
Intel and TI brag about chip tech advancements
Two of the biggest names in chips, Intel and Texas Instruments, have taken this fine Monday to announce independent advancements made by their R&D departments in the never-ending search to continue Moore's law. TI kicked things off by unveiling their new 45nm manufacturing process that uses some immersion lithography trickery to trump Intel's current 65nm chips by 30 percent. They plan to use the tech for memory chips. Intel, of course, is not to be outdone, and announced a new better way to insulate circuits. Their new "tri-gate transistors," which should be on the scene by 2010, reduce the power leak problems experienced when transistors are dropped lower than 90nm. The tech could cut power consumption by as much as 35 percent or boost performance by 45 percent. "This will be an option for chips somewhere beyond 45 nm--in the 32 or 22 nm mode--so that gives us confidence we can continue scaling Moore's Law into the next decade," said Intel's Mike Mayberry. The tech also does away with the troublesome carbon nanotubes that IBM has been proposing, which are currently too costly to produce chips with. Now we're just waiting for AMD to announce a 22nm chip due next week and for half the cost, then our day will be complete. Don't let us down, guys!Read - Intel "tri-gate transistors"Read - AMD 45nm manufacturing
