Intel Expects to Have 100 Developers Evaluating Many-Core Accelerators by Year End

From X-bit Labs: At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) the world's largest maker of microprocessors provided an update on the progress of the Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) architecture for high-performance computing segments. Intel plans to launch its first MIC product on Intel’s upcoming 22nm process technology and expects to have more than 100 developer sites for MIC by the end of 2011.

The add-on accelerators Intel MIC micro-architecture are expected to be used for highly parallel applications in high performance computing segments such as scientific exploration and research, weather modeling and other. But MIC - just like existing AMD FireStream or Nvidia Tesla solutions - will not replace processors like AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon, but will accelerate special applications only. Even though at present developers use proprietary tools to take advantage of Tesla or FireStream pretty successfully, as the world's No. 1 supercomputer now uses Nvidia Tesla along with Intel Xeon chips, Intel insists that x86 compatibility with x86 will give it unique advantages.

"Think about Intel MIC as a co-processor. The advantage here is that you can use the same compilers, the same tools, the same [Intel] VTunes [performance profilers] that power around 90% of the Top 500. The next generation you run the compiler, it will optimize the workloads for the Intel cores, that are in the Xeon CPUs, and it will optimize on these new PCI Express cards that will have more than 50 cores and be on our 22nm process technology. So it will automatically balance that workload for the highest-parallel workloads on the planet," Kirk Skaugen, vice president of the Intel architecture group and general manager of Intel's data center group, during his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF).

So far Intel has supplied code-named Knights Ferry MIC test platform to select developers and plans to expand the number of developers, who can have the hardware, to one hundred by the end of 2011. While the number seems to be large, it is negligible compared to access to Nvidia's CUDA highly-parallel software development platform, which is available for everyone. Back in 2010 the company indicated that 600 thousand CUDA toolkits had been downloaded.

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