News Intel launches 72-core Knights Landing Xeon Phi

Obligatory 'But can it run Crysis?'

 

Perfect hypervisor CPU??

 

I'd love to have seen how it did perform as a GPU. I'm sure it had issues, but Intel decided more on the move to integrated rather that discreet that killed it off.

 

Terrible. 72 CPU cores doing GPU work - even the most basic GPU has 100s of shaders now. Intel has no interest in the driver commitment and low(er) ASPs the discrete graphics market has.

 

This reply is a little late because it took a few days for my account to be activated.

But yeah, that's not really true. A GPU shader is not equivalent to a CPU core, because GPU vendors play games with their architecture to do more work with less die complexity. Since they know graphics tasks are typically vector-based (RGBA, XYZW, UV, and so forth) and neighbouring tasks are often very similar (two neighbouring pixels on the screen are probably running the same instructions, just on slightly offset data) they can design a circuit that accepts multiple pieces of work with less logic than if they were crunched individually.

Knights Landing does the same.

This "72 core" count is built upon 512-bit registers. This means that, if you have sixteen 32-bit values that always follow the same set of instructions, you can pack them all together. GPUs do the same, NVIDIA packs 32 values into a "warp", and AMD packs 64 values into a "wavefront" (these values can change but it never has yet).

72 * 16 = 1152.

Beyond that, each of the 72 cores can support four simultaneous threads. In fact, each of the 72 cores have two, 512-bit vector units. Depending on how you count, this means that Knights Landing (minus any disabled cores) has 1152, 2304, or 4608 shaders. 2304 is probably the most honest value, though.