Intel announces Xeon Phi coprocessor brand

Yesterday Intel announced brand name for the first generation of company's coprocessors for High Performance Computing (HPC) market. New products, branded "Xeon Phi", will integrate more than 50 cores, and will offer more than 1 TFlop (trillion of floating-point operations per second) of performance in highly parallel applications. The co-processors will be available in the second half 2012.

Details on the Xeon Phi coprocessors are sketchy at this time. The products will be based on Many Integrated Core architecture, and will be produced on Intel's 22nm technology, using 3D tri-gate transistors. The coprocessors are going to have 512-bit wide SIMD unit, and will integrate 8 GB of GDDR5 memory or more. The Xeon Phi parts will be available in PCIe form factor, and, similar to ATI and NVIDIA cards, they are intended to be used along with general-purpose microprocessors. Volume production of Xeon Phi products will start by the end of 2012. Although they are not in production yet, Intel already has the first supercomputer with Xeon Phi parts operational. Dubbed "Discovery", the supercomputer combines eight-core Xeon E5-2670 CPUs with not yet released coprocessors. The Discovery cluster currently features 9800 CPU cores, and has Linpack performance of 118 TFlops, which is good enough for 150th spot in the TOP500 list of supercomputers. In the near future we may see more supercomputers with Xeon Phi co-processors, such as Cray "Cascade". The first Petascale class computer with Xeon Phi products, "Stampede", will be functional in early 2013.