Xeon Phi is a line of Xeon CPUs manufactured by Intel, first released in 2011, that are 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 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, and up to 16 GB of 8-channel 3D MCDRAM.
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
