8/01/2012 06:39:00 PM
dannzfay
Intel has apparently removed Nvidia from some supercomputer deals originally planned to use Nvidia's Tesla GPU compute cards. The largest CPU company in the world apparently used its influence and some bold claims to sway the supercomputer architects to go Xeon Phi instead of Tesla.
As VR-Zone reports, Now, Intel is ready with a newer revision of its Knights Corner chip and, this time, different board configurations have been sent out to various technology partners. The B0 stepping has been configured in three main configurations containing 57 cores, 60 core and 61 cores. We know the numbering seems strange, but Intel’s previous versions weren’t any easier to remember. Let’s call these versions 57C, 60C and 61C. We need to make this denomination, as the boards will complicate things even more, as there are configurations with 3 GB, 6 GB or 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. Depending on the number of active cores, each chip will have a level 1 cache size ranging from 1.8 MB to 1.9 MB and a level 2 cache size between 28 MB and 30.5 MB.
The 57C chip will be paired with 3 GB or 6 GB of GDDR5 memory and the minimal clock speed will be 600 Mhz for the Intel chip and between 4.5 GHz and 6 GHz for the QDR memory. The 60C and 61C chips will be paired with 8 GB of GDDR5 memory and will have a minimal clock speed of 630 MHz. The 57C boards will have the highest clock rate for main processor and that will be 1.1 Ghz. The 60C and 61C board will be able to achieve only 1.05 Ghz or 1.09 Ghz, depending on the configuration. Most of the cards will come with no active cooling and will rely on custom liquid cooling solutions, or will have huge heatsinks that will be cooled by the air flow present in most rackable servers.
The main processor on the Xeon Phi cards surely comes with some form of throttling feature, as cooling off 300 watts of dissipated heat might prove difficult even for the high-speed server fans. There will be two cards that will fit in a TDP of “just” 245 watts, but the rest of the configurations are built with a 300W TDP in mind. For more information on Intel’s Larabee architecture and Xeon Phi cards, check out Theo Valich’s detailed report.
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| Intel Xeon Phi logo Image credits to Intel |
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| Intel Xeon Phi Accelerator Card Image credits to Intel |
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