New chip from Intel making its way into the Workstation market - from PC World:
Intel's 72-core processor jumps from supercomputers to workstations
Intel wants to change the game in desktop computing with a workstation that packs its upcoming, 72-core supercomputing chip.
Intel's workstation will be based on an upcoming Xeon Phi chip code-named Knights Landing, which is being touted as the company's most powerful chip to date.
A limited number of workstations will ship in the first half of next year from Intel, which will also control initial distribution. As usage expands, hopefully PC makers and other partners will sign on to sell Xeon Phi desktops, said Charles Wuischpard, general manager of the HPC Platform Group at Intel.
Performance specs? They don't mention much:
The Knights Landing chip can deliver over 3 teraflops of peak performance, which is roughly in the range of some high-performance graphics chips used in the world's fastest supercomputers.
Much like graphics chips, Knights Landing is designed for highly parallel computing and varies in design from conventional x86 chips. It mixes conventional x86 CPUs with specialized processing units that help the chip take on heavy workloads.
Knights Landing could also bring many innovations to 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. Intel also claims the stacked memory is five times more power efficient and three times denser than GDDR5, which is used on graphics cards.
In addition to the OS, programming tools and other software programs will be preloaded on the workstation. The chip itself will be tightly integrated into the system, making it tough to add more memory and components.
No mention of price but this will be a big seller to engineering companies (computational fluid dynamics), weather forecasting, motion picture render farms. The mind doth boggle!