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Chipmaker Intel has lifted the lid on a new high-performance processor chip for high-performance computing called "Knight’s Corner" which is capable of delivering more than 1 TFLOP of sustained double precision floating point calculations.
Based on Intel’s MIC (many integrated core) architecture, the new chip will be made with Intel’s 3-D Tri-Gate 22nm transistor process and is optimised for highly parallel supercompuer-like applications such as weather prediction, protein folding and materials simulation.
Intel pointed out that the first time the 1 TFLOP barrier was broken was 1997 ASCI Red at Sandia Labs. That system based on 9298 Pentium II Xeons filled 72 cabinets (pictured) where as the new Knights Bright solution will be deployed on a single PCI-E card.
The company said that the new chip was a vital stepping stone to so-called Exa-scale computing where future supercomputers will be capable of performance in excess of one ExaFLOP/s, or one ‘quintillion’ operations per second, hundreds of times faster than the supercomputers of today.
