Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 - Xeon Phi

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family reached a new supercomputing milestone as the fastest adopted new processing technology to power 44 systems, including 3 Petascale-class supercomputers on the 39th edition of the Top500 list announced today.

The "SuperMUC" supercomputer at LRZ in Germany, which ranked fourth on the list, delivers 2.9 PetaFLOPs of performance, making it the most powerful in Europe, as well as the largest installation based on the new Intel Xeon processors E5 family.

At the International Supercomputing Conference, Intel Corporation also announced that Intel Xeon Phi is the new brand name for all future Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture (Intel MIC architecture) based products. Available by the end of 2012, the first generation of Intel Xeon Phi product family (coprocessors codenamed "Knights Corner") will complement the existing Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/4600 product families and deliver new levels of performance for highly parallel workloads. While the first generation primarily targets high performance computing (HPC), future generations of Intel Xeon Phi products will also address enterprise datacenters and workstations.

First Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor Due This Year
Intel disclosed new technical details of the first commercially available product from its Intel Xeon Phi product family, a coprocessor codenamed "Knights Corner." In addition to delivering breakthrough performance for highly parallel applications, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor's ease of use is bolstered by the benefits of familiar programming models, techniques and developer tools available with Intel architecture. With greater use of parallel CPU code, software companies and IT departments do not have to retrain developers on proprietary programming models associated with accelerators.

Beyond its compatibility with x86 programming models, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor will be visible to applications as an HPC-optimized, highly-parallel, separate compute node that runs its own Linux-based operating system independent of the host OS. This feature allows more flexibility when implementing cluster solutions that are not available with alternative graphics accelerator-based technologies.

Made with Intel's innovative 22nm, 3-D tri-gate transistors, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, available in a PCIe form factor, contains more than 50 cores and a minimum of 8GB of GDDR5 memory. It also features 512b wide SIMD support that improves performance by enabling multiple data elements to be processed with a single instruction. Last year Intel showed a live demonstration of the single Knights Corner coprocessor delivering over 1 TeraFLOPs (1 trillion floating point operations per second) of double precision real life performance, as measured by DGEMM. At ISC'12 Intel demonstrated the same effective performance of more than 1 TeraFLOPs per node but measured by the industry standard benchmark Linpack (Rmax)1. By comparison, in 1997, it took more than 9000 Intel