Xeon Phi

Updated: 05/21/2018 by Computer Hope
Intel Xeon Phi generation 2 Knights Landing CPU

Xeon Phi is a line of Xeon CPUs (central processing unit) manufactured by Intel released in 2011, classified as "manycore." They contain many smaller cores to enable high performance by applications designed to be massively parallel. The Xeon Phi was initially offered as a PCIe (PCI Express) add-on card, code-named Knights Crossing. The second generation of Xeon Phi processors, code-named Knights Landing, was released in 2013 as a CPU socketed in a motherboard.

A Knights Landing CPU has 72 Airmont Atom cores. Each capable of executing four parallel threads, for a total of 288 simultaneous threads per CPU, running at speeds between 1.3 and 1.7 GHz. The architecture supports up to 384 GB of 6-channel DDR4-2400 RAM (random-access memory), and up to 16 GB of 8-channel 3-D MCDRAM (multi-channel direct random access memory).

Notable computers using Xeon Phi

As of early 2017, the world's second fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2 located in Guangzhou, China, uses Xeon Phi Knights Landing processors to achieve speeds of 33.16 petaFLOPS.

CPU terms, Intel, Xeon