Intel announces HPC Knights Landing Xeon Phi accelerator

The initial systems with Knights Landing Xeon Phi accelerator have been shipped to customers, says Intel. Knights Landing is the a manycore x86 architecture that Intel has developed over the years. 

The previous iteration of the hardware, Knights Corner, used a modified Intel Pentium core (P54C). The Knights Landing-based Xeon Phi is a liquid-cooled system with six DIMM slots, dual gigabit Ethernet ports , 16GB of MCDRAM, AVX-512, and 72 CPU cores.

With the introduction of the new Xeon Phi accelerators it is possible to boot from the cpu  and the system memory is integrated on the CPU for additional performance. It is possible to create a complete cluster with only Xeon Phi withouth any other Xeon systems.

The Knights Landing Xeon Phi card has been tested and validated ever since late last year by various partners , including Cray. The new Xeon Phi card is produced at 14nm and contains up to 72 cores, it features 16GB of multi-channel dram which can do a transfer rate of 400GB/s. Knights Landing provides support for 36 PCI-E 3.0 lanes and uses what is referred to as the Omni-Path architecture .

Omni-Path is part of Intel's Scalable System Framework for High Performance Computing. Intel says that the accelerator can be used for applications in the field of artificial intelligence, an emphasis that is inspired by Google who started their own artificial intelligence project.