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Jun. 1, 2010

Earlier this morning, Intel has announced that it will soon be offering a new 32-core server CPU based on a new high-performance server architecture that mixes older x86 cores with specialized cores for much faster processing power of highly parallel scientific and business applications.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's data center group says "dubbed Knights Ferry, the new chip is Intel's fastest server CPU ever and delivers more than 500 gigaflops of performance for complex and mission-critical applications."

The new 32-core CPUs will only be available in September and for development purposes, however.

The new server CPUs will be part of the Sandy Bridge chip architecture, manufactured using the 22-nanometer process, and those chips are due to reach PCs and laptops only next year.

The initial 32-core CPU is made using the existing 45-nm process. The chip's cores run at 1.2 GHz.

It's the first time that Intel calls its new chips "Knights" which it describes as being based on many integrated cores but all on one single chip.

Knights Ferry includes 32 main Xeon chip cores, with corresponding 512-bit vector processing units in the PCI-Express slot. The new processor runs four threads per core and includes 8 MB of shared cache, and up to 2 GB of fast GDDR5 memory.

Intel will merge the CPU cores and vector units into a single unit as chip development continues, Skaugen added.

The new CPU will be able to accelerate highly parallel applications and greatly improve the speed of large and complex databases used in the enterprise segment, Skaugen said.

It could also standardize software development platforms around the x86 architecture, making it easier to recompile software, added Skaugen.

Both for this year and next, the chip giant has many new server processors in its pipeline. Three weeks ago, Intel said it would release a successor to its eight-core Nehalem-EX chips in 2011, with even more cores and faster speeds.

The new processors, code-named Westmere-EX, will be for servers with four or more CPU sockets.

Intel says it is also currently developing an experimental 48-core x86 processor with a mesh design, but has not yet announced any plans to sell it.

The "Knights" architecture is the biggest CPU server design shift since Intel launched its famous Xeon chips in 2005, Skaugen said. The new chips include elements of the Larrabee chip, characterized as a highly parallel, multicore x86 processor designed for graphics and high-performance computing.

But Intel said on May 26 that it had cancelled Larrabee for the short term and added that elements of the processor would first be used in server CPUs and then later in laptops.

Overall, the chip giant already has a significant lead in the server CPU market, but the new chip and surrounding architecture could extend its presence even further. According to the Top500 list, 408 supercomputers -- more than 80 percent of the list -- use Intel's chips, giving it a significant lead over other chip companies like AMD, its closest competitor.

Intel's new architecture could also help shield it somewhat from competitors like Nvidia and AMD, which can feature hundreds of computing cores to speed up complex application performance. The graphics processors are faster at executing certain specialized applications.

The second fastest supercomputer in the world, Nebulae in China, combines chips with GPUs to boost application performance.

Source: Intel.

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