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The advent of Intel's massively parallel coprocessor will make every server a supercomputer. This week, Intel unveiled its new Xeon Phi coprocessor, which puts an astonishing 50 x86 cores onto a single PCI-connected card. The term "coprocessor" should be understood in context. Every one of the Phi's cores can boot Linux and run any x86 software. However, the card itself needs to plug into a system that has an independent CPU, which basically oversees the Phi's operations. Hence, the coprocessor appellation. The first model to be released in Q1 of next year will have 50 cores, and the follow-up coprocessor slated for release in mid-2013 will have 60 cores. Each processor supports four threads, making for 200 threads for the initial Phi. The cores run at 1.05 GHz and sport a 512-KB L2 cache each. They collectively share 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. They will liely compete with GPU based solutions from NVIDIA and AMD - but with a more familiar programmign model. Things just got very interesting in the high performance compute world. Click on the image or the title to learn more.
