Intel to Refresh Xeon Phi Coprocessor Line in Mid-2013

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. does not have plans to introduce brand-new Xeon Phi coprocessor cards every year, like it does with its central processing units, but the company does intend to release new accelerators from time to time. In addition to already announced Xeon Phi 3100-series products due in the first half of the year, Intel will also unveil new 5100- and 7100-series coprocessors starting this May.

According to a leaked Intel roadmap, the world’s largest chipmaker intends to release Xeon Phi 5120D, 3120A, 3120P, 7120P and 7120X coprocessor products sometimes in May – July, 2013, which is in line with the plan to bring Xeon Phi 3100-series to the market in the first half of the year. Exact specifications of the co-processors are unknown, but all of them are based on Knights Corner chip. The Xeon Phi 3100-series was supposed to deliver over 1TFLOPS peak double precision performance, whereas Xeon Phi 5120D, 7120P and 7120X coprocessors are supposed to be faster. At present, Intel does not have exact shipment date for the new products, but expects them to become generally available from May 1, 2013 to July 31, 2013.

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 family will provide great value for those seeking to run compute-bound workloads such as life science applications and financial simulations. The Intel Xeon Phi 3100 family will offer more than 1TFLOPS double-precision performance, support for up to 6GB memory at 240GB/s bandwidth, and a series of reliability features including memory error correction codes (ECC). The family will operate within a 300W thermal design point (TDP) envelope. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 will have recommended customer price below $2000.

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P, the only Xeon Phi available today commercially, features 60 cores with 4-way simultaneous multi-threading technology and 512KB L2 cache per core, provides additional performance at a lower power envelope. It reaches 1.01TFLOPS double-precision performance, and supports 8GB of GDDR5 memory at a higher 320 GB/sec memory bandwidth. With 225 watts TDP, the passively cooled Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P delivers power efficiency that is ideal for dense computing environments, and is aimed at capacity-bound workloads such as digital content creation and energy research. This processor has been delivered to early customers and featured in the 40th edition of the top500 list. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P has recommended customer price of $2649.

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