Intel releases the most powerful micro-processor chip ever produced. According to PC World, it will be used by the U.S. Department of Energy for its 9,300-core Cori supercomputer. Intel claims that 50 different manufacturers, including DELL and Lenovo, will ship systems that use Knight’s Landing in 2016.
Knights Landing, boasts 72 cores all built in the company’s 14nm TGT process. The resulting hardware can compute single-precision calculations at a rate of 8 teraflops, or double-precision calculations at over 3 teraflops. Intel is providing the software, networking and other tools, to help in such workloads.
Moreover, the chip has been expected to have the same performance range that few graphics chips use in the fastest supercomputers in today’s world. Then, they’re bundled up-along with 16GB of on-package MCDRAM memory-into a PCI-E add-in card.
The chip combines conventional x86 CPU’s with specialized processing units with specialized processing units that would help the chip to take on heavy workloads. Like its predecessors, Knights landing will be a coprocessor alongside CPUs and assist in solving complex calculations. However, the chip is said to be tightly integrated, which would make it really difficult to add more memory and components.
Of course, the average PC gamer isn’t going to be able to afford a workstation with a Knights Landing processor. But it does fulfill a long-time dream of Intel to bring a powerful chip to desktops.