Intel takes wraps off 50-core supercomputing coprocessor
Intel's Larrabee GPU will finally go into commercial production next year, but not as a graphics processor. Instead, the part will make its debut in a 50-core incarnation fabbed on Intel's 22nm and aimed squarely at one of the fastest growing and most important parts of NVIDIA's business: math coprocessors for high-performance computing (HPC).
When Intel's ambitious, hybrid software/hardware GPU effort failed in late 2009 due to delays, Intel insisted that the silicon side of the project would live on in some form. The next year, the company announced that Larrabee had morphed into the Knight's family of HPC coprocessors, which the company began shipping in very limited quantities as a research testbed. Intel also began calling the basic architecture of the Knight's family is Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture.
Today's announcement is the official unveiling of Intel's broader plan to commercialize the MIC-based Knight's family, starting with the 50-core Knight's Corner chip on 22nm. Intel is also announcing partnerships with SGI and other system integrators that plan to build commercial HPC systems around the MIC silicon.
