Intel has taken the wraps off Knights Landing, its next-gen, up-to-72-core Xeon Phi supercomputing chip. The main change is that Knights Landing will be a standalone processor, rather than a slot-in coprocessor that must be paired with standard Xeon CPU. Furthermore, Knights Landing will have up to 16GB of DRAM 3D stacked on-package, providing up to 500GB/sec of memory bandwidth (along with up to 384GB of DDR4-2400 mainboard memory). Knights Landing will debut in 2015 on Intel’s 14nm process, and with a promise of 3 teraflops (double precision) per socket it will almost certainly be used to build some monster 100+ petaflop x86 supercomputers, and beyond to exascale.
The current version of Xeon Phi (Knights Corner) is a PCIe expansion board with an up-to-61-core Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) chip. These cores are based on the original P54C Pentium core — just like its stillborn Larrabee predecessor — but with a lot of modern additions, such as 64-bit support and 512-bit vector registers.
Knights Landing is a major revision of Knights Corner, making sweeping changes across almost the entirety of the platform. Gone are the P54C cores, replaced with up to 72 out-of-order Silvermont (Atom) cores. These new cores will implement AVX-512 (AVX 3.1 instructions). Perhaps most importantly, though, Knights Landing will be a standalone CPU, with an integrated six-channel DDR4-2400 memory controller, up to 16GB of on-package 3D stacked RAM, and 36 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
Source : ExtremeTech
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