Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor
Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors
The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 7200 product family is the next generation of PCI Express form factor add-in cards that work synergistically with the latest Intel Xeon processors to enable performance gains for highly parallel code. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, together with tuned libraries, can accelerate the results of machine learning and deep learning applications.
What is an Intel Coprocessor
The Intel Xeon Phi processor is a multicore coprocessor that is available as a self-boot system. This means that the entire OS and applications can live entire on the coprocessor system, without having to interact frequently with the host system. Since there is no wait time for data transfer, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor can accelerate well designed applications much faster than before. With up to 72 processing cores, it can accelerate applications tremendously, with each core containing two Advanced Vector Extensions, which speeds up the floating point performance – it is capable of delivering up to 2.82 double-precision teraFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) per coprocessor.
While most applications will continue to achieve maximum performance on Intel Xeon processors, certain highly parallel applications will benefit dramatically by using Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. To take full advantage of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors an application must scale well to over 100 software threads and either make extensive use of vectors or efficiently use more local memory bandwidth than is available on an Intel Xeon processor. Examples of segments with highly parallel applications include animation, energy, finance, life sciences, manufacturing, medical, public sector, weather, and more.
Intel Xeon Phi Hardware
The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor gives developers a hardware design point optimized for extreme parallelism, without requiring them to re-architect or rewrite their code. No need to rethink the entire problem or learn a new programming model; simply recompile and optimize existing code using familiar tools, libraries, and runtimes. By maintaining a single source code between Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, developers optimize once for parallelism, but maximize performance on both processor and coprocessor.
| Xeon Phi Specifications | ||
|---|---|---|
| 7240P | 7240A/P | |
| Cores | 68 Cores | 68 Cores |
| Memory | 16GB | 16GB |
| Max TDP | 300W | 300W |
| Performance | 2.82 TeraFLOPS | 2.61 TeraFLOPS |
