US- Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), The American CPU-manufacturer has just unveiled its latest toy; a 72-core processor aimed for a rather limited professional market.
The first half of the next year will be a station for the history of desktop computing.
Intel hopes to be a game changer for the workstations industry, by releasing its own workstation packed with a 72-core processor codenamed Knights Landing. The seemingly most powerful processor ever designed by Intel is based on a Xeon Phi chip.
The company has bound to release a limited number of workstations equipped with this processor, over the first half of next year thus taking control over the initial distribution.
Charles Wuischpard, general manager of the HPC Platform Group at Intel, supports that as the number of customers grows, so will the number of additional partners who will offer to sell Xeon Phi desktops.
In other words, as the most basic law of economics suggests, Intel aims to enlarge the demand for its workstation desktops so that the supply will also increase proportionally.
For those of you who are not that familiar with workstations, those are business desktops used for high demanding tasks, such as programming, graphic designing, etc. They are usually larger than conventional desktops. If you need a good example, then think of the Dell Precision T7610, or the Apple Mac Pro.
What’s more interesting, is the company’s policy of distribution. Intel intends to make its supercomputers available for researchers who don’t have access to Xeon Phi based computers for complex scientific calculations. At least, that will be the first target group. This move, however, points to the conclusion that at the beginning, Intel is looking at the release of its new game changing machines, as an experiment rather than a chance to take the lead in the industry.
The above claim was confirmed by Mr. Wuischpard.
For the sake of comparison, note that The Knights Landing chip can deliver over 3 teraflops of peak performance, which is impressively close to high-performance graphics chips found on some of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers.
At a certain point, Knights Landing processors could be used to optimize conventional desktops. It includes 16GB of on-package MCDRAM memory, in which modules are stacked and connected through a wire. The memory offers five times more bandwidth than the emerging DDR4 memory.
This is apparently Intel’s chance to fulfil its dream of making super-processors available for all kinds of a desktop, a dream that the company was close to turn into reality with the Larrabee chip that was abandoned too soon due to design difficulties, in 2010.
So perhaps the processor manufacturer is closer than ever before. Stay tuned to find out all the latest news on this and many other hot topics.
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