Super Chip from Intel pass of megacomputers, to desktop

[-INTOX-™]

Intel wants to change the game in desktop computing, with a workstation that will be inpulsada by supercomputing chip 72 cores equips several megacomputadoras around the world.

That Intel workstation will be based on a platform Xeon Phi that at the moment has the code name Knights Landing, which is being touted as the most powerful chip company to date.

Intel will put a limited number of these workstations on the market during the first half of next year, which also control the initial distribution. Hoping to expand the use; hopefully PC makers and other partners will join to sell desktops with the Xeon Phi chip, said Charles Wuischpard, general manager of HPC Platforms Group at Intel. 



 

The workstations are typically larger equipment than conventional desktop, an example is Apple MacPro. Computers are widely used for high-end graphics, multimedia edcición contenidoi as films and engineering applications. Workstations today are based largely on the desktop chipset Core, or Intel Xeon chips for servers.

The workstation for Intel supercomputing initially made available to researchers without access to supercomputers based on Xeon Phi for complex scientific calculations. Researchers will be able to write and test the code on the computer before implementation of supercomputers.

The machine is more an experiment than an effort to change the design of the way desktops and workstations, Wuischpard said.

Coprocessors such as Nvidia Quadro and used in conjunction with Intel CPU workstations to increase application performance. But the workstation will only Intel chips Knights Landing when it reaches the market, which load the operating system and will increase application performance.



The Knights Landing chip can deliver more than 3 teraflops of peak performance, which is more or less in the range of some chips of high-performance graphics used in the fastest supercomputers in the world.

As graphics chips, Knights Landing is designed for highly parallel computing and varies in designing conventional x86 chips. Mix a conventional x86 CPU with specialized processing units that help the chip can cope with heavier loads of work.

Knights Landing could also bring many innovations to the desktop. It Includes 16GB of memory MCDRAM package, in which modules are stacked and connected via a cable. The memory has five times more bandwidth than the emerging DDR4 memory. Intel also ensures that the stacked memory is energy efficient five times, and three times denser than the GDDR5, which is used in graphics cards.

In addition to the operating system, programming tools and other software programs are pre-loaded on the workstation. The chip itself is integrated into the system, so it is difficult to add more memory and components.