Intel shows off 50-core processor

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 17 Nov 2011 at 09:02

Intel has shown off a 50-core teraflop processor.

"Knights Corner", as it's been codenamed, is Intel's first Many Integrated Core co-processor.

Intel said Knights Corner will eventually be available commercially as part of a supercomputing platform, to be used for highly parallel applications, such as proteins folding or weather modelling. Knights Corner will be manufactured on the 22nm process, Intel said, and is expected to have more than 50 cores when it arrives.

Intel MIC products will offer both high performance from an architecture specifically designed to process highly parallel workloads

"When available, Intel MIC products will offer both high performance from an architecture specifically designed to process highly parallel workloads, and compatibility with existing x86 programming model and tools," the company said, noting the MIC architecture can run existing applications without having to adjust the code.

"This will allow scientists to use both CPU and co-processor performance simultaneously with existing x86 based applications, dramatically saving time, cost and resources that would otherwise be needed to rewrite them to alternative proprietary languages," Intel said.

High-performance computing (HPC) has come a long way from Intel's first teraflop supercomputer in 1997, which required 9,680 processors, said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Intel Technical Computing Group.

“Having this performance now in a single chip based on Intel MIC architecture is a milestone that will once again be etched into HPC history,” he added.