Intel Announces Xeon E5 and Knights Corner HPC Chip
MojoKid writes "At the supercomputing conference SC2011 yesterday, Intel announced its new Xeon E5 processors and demoed their new Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution. The new Xeons won't be broadly available until the first half of 2012, but Intel has been shipping the new chips to a small number of cloud and HPC customers since September. The new E5 family is based on the same core as the Core i7-3960X Intel launched Monday. The E5, while important to Intel's overall server lineup, isn't as interesting as the public debut of Knights Corner. Recall that Intel's canceled GPU (codenamed Larrabee) found new life as the prototype device for future HPC accelerators and complementary products. According to Intel, Knights Corner packs 50 x86 processor cores into a single die built on 22nm technology. The chip is capable of delivering up to 1TFlop of sustained performance in double-precision floating point code and operates at 1 — 1.2GHz. NVIDIA's current high-end M2090 Tesla GPU, in contrast, is capable of just 665 DP GFlops."
Ron Paul Moves Into Second Place in Iowa AND New Hampshire While Newt Gingrich attracts media attention as he moves up in national polls, Ron Paul is enjoying a surge of his own. The Texas congressman has moved into second place in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to two Bloomberg News polls released this week. [HERE and HERE] In Iowa, he sits one point behind Herman Cain with 19 percent support, according to a poll released Tuesday. And a poll released Wednesday shows him at 17 percent in New Hampshire, far behind Mitt Romney (who has 40 percent support) but six points ahead of the third place finisher, Gingrich. Paul's campaign has demonstrated organizational strength in his numerous straw poll victories. That ability to mobilize supporters could come into play on Jan. 3 in Iowa's caucuses.