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Intel's Knights Landing lands

Intel's latest Xeon Phi processors for high-performance parallel computer systems are now, finally, shipping in volume.

The 14nm chips, which feature eight billion transistors, were already in the hands of Cray, Sandia National Laboratory in the US and a few other boffinry types. Today, our sister site The Next Platform reports the family codenamed Knights Landing – detailed in-depth here and here – are available to anyone with deep-enough pockets.

A top-end Xeon Phi has 72 cores, 1.5GHz clock speed, can crank out 3.46 TFLOPS in 64-bit math calculations, consumes 245W, and costs north of six thousand bucks.

Xeon Phi Knights Landing speeds and feeds ... The GFLOPS column should be TFLOPS (Credit: The Next Platform)

According to The Next Platform:

Intel expects to ship more than 100,000 Xeon Phi units this year into the HPC market, and there is a good chance that more than a few hyperscalers are going to buy a bunch, too, for machine learning and possibly other workloads. More than 30 software vendors have ported their code to the new chip, and others will no doubt follow. And more than 30 system makers are bending metal around the Knights Landing processors.

It's basically like a number-crunching GPU that you throw specialized work at, but it can run x86 software, so you don't need a host CPU to boot it. For one thing, the chip can run Linux and Windows Server and applications on top. ®

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