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Intel Announces New Enterprise Xeons, More Powerful Xeon Phi Cards
MojoKid writes "Intel announced a set of new enterprise products today aimed at furthering its strengths in the TOP500 supercomputing market. As of today, the Chinese Tiahne-2 supercomputer (aka Milky Way 2) is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet at roughly ~54PFLOPs. Intel is putting its own major push behind heterogeneous computing with the Tianhe-2. Each node contains two Ivy Bridge sockets and three Xeon Phi cards. Each node, therefore, contains 422.4GFLOP/s in Ivy Bridge performance — but 3.43TFLOPs/s worth of Xeon Phi. In addition, we'll see new Xeons based on this technology later this year, in the 22nm E5-2600 V2 family, with up to 12 cores. The new chips will be built on Ivy Bridge technology and will offer up to 12 cores / 24 threads. The new Xeons, however, aren't really the interesting part of the story. Today, Intel is adding cards to the current Xeon Phi lineup — the 7120P, 3120P, 3120A, and 5120D. The 3120P and 3120A are the same card — the 'P' is passively cooled, while the "A" integrates a fan. Both of these solutions have 57 CPUs and 6GB of RAM. Intel states that they offer ~1TFLOP of performance, which puts them on par with the 5110P that launched last year, but with slightly less memory and presumably a lower price point. At the top of the line, Intel is introducing the 7120P and 7120X — the 7120P comes with an integrated heat spreader, the 7120X doesn't. Clock speeds are higher on this card, it has 61 cores instead of 60, 16GB of GDDR5, and 352GBps of memory bandwidth. Customers who need lots of cores and not much RAM can opt for one of the cheaper 3100 cards, while the 7100 family allows for much greater data sets."
The x64 Phi cards are a lot easier to program then GPUs. No need to jump through hoops with memory mapping, keep things in sync for SIMD processing or worry about running out of stack space when doing recursion.
Will this be interresting for me? Price/value wise?
You won't get full performance from a Xeon Phi without using the SIMD instructions, so it is not as easy to program as you might hope.
After tantalizing us with an 80-core research CPU umpteen years ago, ordinary consumers have been stuck with core counts in single figures seemingly forever.
I was expecting 32 cores minimum in desktop CPUs by the start of this decade. All this new supercomputer stuff is well and good, but what about lots of cores for us mere mortals too?
How about it Intel? You stopped raising the clock speed and said we'd get lots of cores instead. It hasn't happened. Get with the programme please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2
"There are 16,000 compute nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi chips for a total of 3,120,000 cores."
> Intel Announces New Enterprise Xeons, More Powerful Xeon Phi Cards
Those Chinese scientists are going to be so pissed. :P
In addition, we'll see new Xeons based on this technology later this year, in the 22nm E5-2600 V2 family, with up to 12 cores.
...And yet, because of corporate policies on running the shittiest AV on the planet (Symantec) cranked to the max, my desktop PC will still have the responsiveness of a sloth on 'luudes.
Seriously, I already have 8 cores worth of Xeon (2x4) and the load meter never even twitches, enough RAM to load my entire system drive into, and an SSD system drive. More cores won't help at this point.
It's too bad Thinking Machines Incorporated never had a sticker policy, because the "Fat Tree" routing topology is straight out of TMI (the prior TMI topology, hypercube, didn't allow the customer as much choice to balance cores vs interconnect).
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Xeon, Itanium. I think I've figured out the real genius at Intel.
1. Pick a cool element.
2. Remove a letter.
3. ?????
4. Profit!!!
2015 Arbon
2018 Heliu
2023 Litium
2024 Silion
2026 Eon
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Haven't run into the Phi moniker before. Is this essentially just a souped-up/shrunk version of the AltiVec/Velocity Engine SIMD processor Motorola unveiled in the PowerPC G5? How is it both SIMD and x86 at the same time?
2015 Ron
2018 Aluminum
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
What are the export controls nowadays? Interconnects?
An 8-core Xeon (not i7) is not a mid-range desktop. Nor is "enough RAM to load my entire system drive into", or an SSD system drive.
Even now, those are all higher-end in the general scheme of things. More common on enthusiast machines, sure, but far from "mid-range" in a business system.
Well, if you've got an NVidia card + XEON (which happens to be what I have available at work), then any newly written code is going to be in OpenCL or LLVM IR (via C++ or custom language). If you're going that route, any code you write will more or less work on Phi with little modification (although I have not got a Phi on which I can actually test my hypothesis here, so I may be talking BS!). So in theory at least, it won't be any harder to write code for Phi than for NVidia/AMD. The thing that appeals to me about Phi the most, is simply the slightly less restrictive way you can address memory, code, and the CPU cores. GPU's were originally designed to be a more or less a one way process. You throw geometry data from the CPU to the GPU, and the GPU throws it on the screen. Whilst GPU's are much more general purpose these days, they do still display that heritage in the occasional moment where you realise "damn, I'm unable to access that memory here", or "damn, I have to split this process into two seperate ones because the hardware says so".
Rypton
Adium
and then the portable line
Roton
Neuton
Eectron
and of course the high-speed
Phoon
I likes it!
Where did I hear that before
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.