Intel boasts 1TFLOP/s 22nm co-processor

Intel Corp. has announced its 22nm Knight's Corner compute accelerator that has more than 50 cores. The company also claims to have exceeded Nvidia's Tesla 2090 accelerator with its co-processor's one teraflops of double precision floating point performance.

Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of technical computing at the Intel data center and connected systems group, said the 1TFLOP/s chip was the equivalent of the entire AsciiRed system built in 1997, consisting of 9298 Pentium II Xeon processors. That system made up 72 cabinets of computing power.

"That was a very proud day for us, but today we can get a teraflop of sustained double precision performance in one 3D tri-gate 22nm chip running Linux," noted Hazra. "It's not on Powerpoint, it's a real chip, we have it in our labs and it's working."

Intel later showed off a makeshift system running the chip to select press, though very few additional specs were given out.

"We don't know of any other mainstream architecture chip with this kind of performance," said Hazra, explaining that the main benefits lay in the extreme programmability of the chip.

"The programming model story is clear to us," he said noting that all the software tools being used on Xeons today would be able to scale to Knight's Corner with minimal effort, giving Intel an advantage against rivals such as Nvidia, which requires code to be adapted and ported before being accelerated on a GPU.

Intel's MIC architecture also has the advantage of having been specifically designed to process highly parallel workloads, said Hazra. "It's a significant day. We are so excited about taking this architecture to market."

In addition, Hazra commented on Intel's exascale efforts, saying the firm had set itself a firm goal of reaching the target by 2018, within a 20MW power envelope. To do so, he said, however, would require a large amount of investment and partnership. "It's not just a question of money, it's a question of getting the right brains and eyes looking at solving the issues."

- Sylvie Barak
??EE Times