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A Co-processor No More, Intel's Xeon Phi Will Be Its Own CPU As Well

Posted by timothy on from the career-advancement dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Xeon Phi co-processor requires a Xeon CPU to operate... for now. The next generation of Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Landing and due in 2015, will be its own CPU and accelerator. This will free up a lot of space in the server but more important, it eliminates the buses between CPU memory and co-processor memory, which will translate to much faster performance even before we get to chip improvements. ITworld has a look."

2 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Fully Baked? by DragonDru · · Score: 4, Informative

    Good. The current generation Phi cards are a pain to administer. With luck the new generation will be more fully baked.
    - very hot card, no fans
    - depends on software to down throttle the cards (mine have hit 104C)
    - stripped down OS running on the cards, poor user facing directions for the usage

    Anyway, enough from me.

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    1. Re:Fully Baked? by Junta · · Score: 5, Informative

      I won't disagree about the awkwardness of MPSS, but the 'very hot card, no fans' is because it's meant only to be installed into systems that cooperate with them and have cooling designs where the hosting system takes care of it. For a lot of systems that Phi go into, a fan is actually a liability because those systems already have cooling solutions and a fan actually fights with the designed airflow.

      Of course, that's why nVidia offers up two Tesla variants of every model, one with and one without fan, to cater to both worlds.

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