Intel announced today that the first model of the new Xeon Phi (aka Knights Corner) family of processors is now shipping. A response to high-end GPUs from companies such as nVidia and a stepping stone towards Intel’s goal of reaching 1 exaflop by 2018, the first Knights Corner chip, the Xeon Phi 5110P, has 60 cores and a clock speed of 1.05 GHz. The chip offers 1,011 gigaflops of peak double-precision performance, 30GB of cache and memory capacity of 6GB. Much like a graphics card, the chip can be plugged into a PCI-Express 2.0 slot, and is cooled by a system fan.
Intel will also ship two Phi 3100 series chips in the first half of next year. The chips will offer peak double-precision performance of 1 teraflop per second, and include 28.5GB of cache and memory capacity up to 6GB. The Phi 3100A will come with its own fan, while the 3100T uses the system’s fan.
The first Xeon Phi chips will be used alongside Intel’s Xeon E5 server CPUs in a 10-petaflop supercomputer called Stampede that could be active at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas by early next year.
