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A Co-processor No More, Intel's Xeon Phi Will Be Its Own CPU As Well
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."
The 80486 was the first Intel processor with integrated coprocessor, coming at about €1000 (only know the DM price). There was a considerably cheaper version, the 80486SX "without" coprocessor (actually, the coprocessor was usually just disabled, possibly because of yield problems, and still took current).
One could buy an 80487 coprocessor that provided the missing floating point performance. Customers puzzled how the processor/coprocessor combination could be competitive without the on-chip communication of the 80486. The answer was that it did not even try. The "coprocessor" contained a CPU as well and simply switched off the "main" processor completely. It was basically a full 80486 with different pinout, pricing, and marketing.
It was probably phased out once the yields became good enough.
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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