Intel’s new Xeon Phi coprocessors are powering the world’s fastest computer — “Milky Way 2,” built for China’s National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou. At the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, Intel revealed that 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and 32,000 Intel Xeon processors were used to create Milky Way 2, which delivers a peak performance of 54.9 PFlops (54.9 quadrillion floating point operations per second) — more than twice the performance of the top rated system from the last edition of the Top500 list in November 2012.
Intel also announced five new Xeon Phi coprocessors: the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 7100 family is designed and optimized to provide the best performance and offer the highest level of features, including 61 cores clocked at 1.23GHz, 16 GB of memory capacity support (double the amount previously available in accelerators or coprocessors) and over 1.2 TFlops of double precision performance. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 family is designed for high performance per dollar value. The family features 57 cores clocked at 1.1 GHz and 1TFlops of double precision performance. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5100 family is optimized for high-density environments with the ability to allow sockets to attach directly to a mini-board for use in blade form factors.
Looking further ahead, the second generation Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, codenamed “Knights Landing,” will be manufactured using Intel’s 14nm process technology featuring second generation 3-D tri-gate transistors. It will be available either on a PCIe card or a host processor (CPU). As a PCIe card-based coprocessor, “Knights Landing” will handle offload workloads from the system’s Intel Xeon processors and provide an upgrade path for users of current generation of coprocessors. As a host processor directly installed in the motherboard socket, it will function as a CPU and enable the next leap in compute density and performance per watt, handling all the duties of the primary processor and the specialized coprocessor at the same time.
