Intel opens up about its ‘Knights Corner’ supercomputer co-processor

Intel opens up about its Knights Corner supercomputer offering

HotChips is the show where chip makers come to show off their latest slices of silicon, and Knights Corner architect George Chrysos spilled the beans on Santa Clara's Xeon Phi co-processor. The unit's designed to bolt onto Xeon chips to help supercomputers crunch the numbers faster, by handling the "highly parallel" grunt work necessary for genetic and climate modeling, among other things. Chrysos has lofty goals for the hardware, hoping that it'll contribute to "scientific and technical progress," while we're just excited to see if it can help the company reclaim its Top 500 crown from IBM.

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Intel opens up about its 'Knights Corner' supercomputer co-processor originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMD bares all with Southern Islands GPU shots

AMD bares all with Southern Islands GPU shots

AMD's been showing off its forthcoming wares at Hot Chips, and has taken the rare step of releasing detailed die shots for its Southern Islands GPUs. According to AnandTech, the company's shy about releasing such details, since it's aiming to beat rival NVIDIA to the punch by several months. Still, it's letting us humble members of the public peer inside the gallery we've got for you below, just as long as you pinkie-swear that you won't be selling the secrets to the boys in Santa Clara, okay?

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AMD bares all with Southern Islands GPU shots originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMD teases next-gen Steamroller CPU, aims to Bulldoze the competition

AMD teases nextgen Steamroller CPU, aims to Bulldoze the competition

AMD's Bulldozer CPUs remind us of Betamax (or MiniDisc), in that its superlative design hasn't been embraced thanks to one or two humbling limitations. However, Mark Papermaster, Sunnyvale's new CTO, took to the stage at Hot Chips to show how he's changing the situation with the third-generation Steamroller architecture. It's rowing back on the more experimental elements of the design, scrapping the single shared fetch-and-decode hardware in favor of dual-cores that should double the amount of instructions it can handle. It's hoping to make performance gains of 15 percent, clawing back some of Intel's lead, and is considering roping in the GPU to help with the heavy-hitting in future versions. The chips will be built at Globalfoundries 28-nanometer line and are hoped to be out at some point next year.

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AMD teases next-gen Steamroller CPU, aims to Bulldoze the competition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 08:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier

IBM pushing System z, Power7 chips as high as 55GHz, mainframes get mightier

Ten-core, 2.4GHz Xeons? Pshaw. IBM is used to the kind of clock speeds and brute force power that lead to Europe-dominating supercomputers. Big Blue has no intentions of letting its guard down when it unveils its next generation processors at the upcoming Hot Chips conference: the company is teasing that the "zNext" chip at the heart of a future System z mainframe will ramp up to 5.5GHz -- that's faster than the still-speedy 5.2GHz z196 that has led IBM's pack since 2010. For those who don't need quite that big a sledgehammer, the technology veteran is hinting that its upcoming Power7+ processors will be up to 20 percent faster than the long-serving Power7, whose current 4.14GHz peak clock rate may seem quaint. We'll know just how much those extra cycles mean when IBM takes to the conference podium on August 29th, but it's safe to say that our databases and large-scale simulations won't know what hit them.

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IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Aug 2012 02:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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