Intel Announce 10nm Chips Capabilities and Release Plans

We reported early in 2014 of Intel’s 14nm “Fab 42” plant remaining closed and the rumors surrounding 10nm chip manufacturing that came with it – from recent reports it now seems like it’s a a reality.

As IBM and NVIDIA have teamed up to win the next generation of top-level US government supercomputers, Intel is not to be left in the dust. After 50 years of global supercomputing, the Intel platform occupies a massive 85.5% of all machines, with a reported 97% ownership in new age systems. Today, Intel have announced the details of some of their planning in high-performance computing.

The announcements have come to us thanks to CNBeta and Chiphell, these are listed in dot point form as:

• The third-generation Xeon Phi family, codenamed “Knights Hill”, will use Intel’s 10nm process. This is the first publicly identified 10nm product, as well as Intel Omni-Path fiber optic interconnection technology. Intel’s upcoming second generation “Knights Landing” will be the first commercial system set to debut early next year.
• The industry’s interest in Xeon Phi is more concentrated. There are already a large number of customers looking to order Knights Landing, of which more than 50 percent will use the processor version, and the rest set to utilize the PCI-E accelerator card version. The total computing capacity is said to contain more than 100 PFlops (10 quadrillion floating-point calculations).
  NOTE: Using the Intel Xeon Phi to accelerate your system is done through a PCI-E expansion card, this card must be used with Xeon processors and can only be used as a coprocessor. The next generation will have separate processor and coprocessor versions.
• Knights Landing’s latest implementations include: Los Alamos, Sandia Supercomputers “Trinity”, the US Department of Energy National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) ultra-count “Cori”, Earth Science Enterprise DownUnder GeoSolutions, large-scale cooperation projects in SGI and the National Supercomputer Center IT4 Innovations projects in Europe (to deploy large clusters).
• Omni-Path Interconnect architecture with provides 100 Gbps of bandwidth, fiber-optic switching and medium-sized clusters. Comparing this to the now popular InfiniBand, latency can be reduced up to 56%. The product architecture will use a 48 switch chip, in comparison to InfiniBand using up to only 36.
• Intel Fabric Builders project has started, created based on the ecosystem Omini-Path. The Intel Parallel Computing Center also announced their expansion will be the construction of 40 facilities in 13 countries and regions.
• Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre v2.2 has been scheduled for release.

That’s quite a lot of information to take in one hit, so we will continue to report on this as the story develops. We’re sure that Intel will now sit down and take a look at these siz points one by one in the near future, so help keep it streamlined and easy to track for consumers.

Image courtesy of Chiphell