Intel Reveals New Product Plans For High-Performance Computing

Intel's branching out yet again. Not content with just ruling the roost in the consumer CPU arena, the netbook arena and the mobile PC arena, the company is extending their reach to the High-Performance Computing sector, and while you probably won't find this in your next gaming PC, this stuff has the potential to really change our lives for the better behind the scenes. Medical research, scientific studies, you name it.


The latest introductions were made at this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), with the company planned to deliver new products based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that will create platforms running at trillions of calculations per second, while also retaining the benefits of standard Intel processors. Targeting high-performance computing segments such as exploration, scientific research and financial or climate simulation, the first product, codenamed “Knights Corner,” will be made on Intel’s 22-nanometer manufacturing (nm) process – using transistor structures as small as 22 billionths of a meter – and will use Moore’s Law to scale to more than 50 Intel processing cores on a single chip. That's a pretty big, bold claim, but we should be able to validate soon since they're already shipping out to "select developers."


For consumers, the great news here is that some of this high-end stuff eventually filters down to our level, so it's always great to see huge shifts at the top when looking for huge shifts at the bottom. It's hard to say when we'll all own "personal supercomputers," but if progress like this continues, it may be sooner than we all expect.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• The first product codenamed “Knights Corner” will target Intel’s 22nm process and use Moore’s Law to scale to more than 50 Intel cores.
• Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® Many Integrated Core architecture-based products to share common tools, software algorithms and programming techniques.
• Products build upon Intel’s history of many-core related research including Intel’s “Larrabee” program and Single-chip Cloud Computer
• The share of the TOP500 list that features Intel processors grows to 408 systems, nearly 82 percent.