Please note that Aspen Systems no longer sells Intel Xeon Phi products, as they have been discontinued. This page remains as a historical reference. Please take a look at the new Cascade Lake family of processors, instead.
Introducing Intel’s Knights Landing
Knights Landing is the codename for Intel’s 2nd generation Xeon Phi Product Family, which delivers massive thread parallelism, data parallelism and memory bandwidth – with improved single-thread performance and Intel Xeon processor binary-compatibility in a standard CPU form factor.
2U Intel Xeon Phi Processor (KNL) Quad Module Server/Omni-Path Host Fabric Interface
Designed for parallelized workflows in the HPC market and features four Intel Compute Modules, each with support for the Intel Xeon Phi Processor. The Intel Omni-Path Host Fabric Interface Adapter offers up to 100 Gbps per port of bandwidth, delivering performance that scales with high node and core counts. The hot-swappable compute modules, 3.5″ drive bays, and redundant power supply modules offer easy serviceability.
The most distinguishing feature of the chip is that it’s a bootable host CPU — unlike its predecessor Knights Corner, which is a coprocessor that connects over PCIe. The Knights Landing Phi is the first chip to offer an integrated fabric, Intel’s Omni-Path Architecture (OPA), in the package.
Knights Landing also puts integrated on-package memory in a processor, which benefits memory bandwidth and overall application performance. A six-channel memory controller supports up to 384 GB of DDR4-2400 memory (~90GB/s sustained bandwidth). There are 36 PCI Express 3.0 lanes for connecting PCIe SSDs or discrete graphics cards. The MIC (Many Integrated Cores) design fits 8 billion transistors on a die, using 14 nm process technology. The Phi product family comes in two variants: a stand-alone CPU, and a stand-alone CPU with integrated Omni-Path fabric technology. The SKU stack that Intel is launching includes four parts with different core counts, frequencies, TDPs and price points.
Product Specifications
| Processor Number | Cache | Clock Speed | # of Cores/ # of Threads |
Max TDP/ Power |
OPA on Chip |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7290F (16GB, 1.50 GHz, 72 core) |
36 | 1.50 GHz | 72/72 | 260 | Yes |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7290 (16GB, 1.50 GHz, 72 core) |
36 | 1.50 GHz | 72/72 | 245 | No |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7250F (16GB, 1.40 GHz, 68 core) |
34 | 1.40 GHz | 68/68 | 230 | Yes |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7250 (16GB, 1.40 GHz, 68 core) |
34 | 1.40 GHz | 68/68 | 215 | No |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7230F (16GB, 1.30 GHz, 64 core) |
32 | 1.30 GHz | 64/64 | 230 | Yes |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7230 (16GB, 1.30 GHz, 64 core) |
32 | 1.30 GHz | 64/64 | 215 | No |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7210F (16GB, 1.30 GHz, 64 core) |
32 | 1.30 GHz | 64/64 | 230 | Yes |
|
Xeon Phi Processor 7210 (16GB, 1.30 GHz, 64 core) |
32 | 1.30 GHz | 64/64 | 215 | No |
Many Trailblazing Improvements in Knights Landing
| Improvements | What / Why |
|---|---|
| Self-Boot Processor | No PCIe bottleneck |
| Binary Compatibility with Xeon | Runs all legacy software. No recompilation. |
| New Core: SLM based | ~3x higher ST performance over KNC |
| Improved Vector density | 3+ TFLOPS (DP) peak per chip |
| AVX 512 ISA | New 512-bit Vector ISA with Masks |
| Scatter/Gather Engine | Hardware support for gather and scatter |
| New memory technology: MCDRAM + DDR | Large High Bandwidth Memory, MCDRAM Huge bulk memory, DDR |
| New on-die interconnect: Mesh | High BW connection between cores and memory |
Summary
- Knights Landing (KNL) is the first self-boot Intel Xeon Phi processor
- Many improvements for performance and programmability
- Significant leap in scalar and vector performance
- Significant increase in memory bandwidth and capacity
- Binary compatible with Intel Xeon processor
- Common programming models between Intel Xeon processor and Intel Xeon Phi processor
- KNL offers immense amount of parallelism (both data and thread)
- Future trend is further increase in parallelism for both Intel Xeon processor and Intel Xeon Phi processor
- Developers need to prepare software to extract full benefits from this trend
Choose from Some of Our Most Popular Intel Xeon Phi Chassis
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