Intel’s Larrabee may have been a disaster, but that doesn’t mean all that research was for naught. It’s now surfaced in their upcoming, 50-core Knights Corner supercomputing processor, which will soon be commercially available.
Ars Technica says that it will compete with NVIDIA’s Tesla Supercomputer processor, but will aim for ease of implementation, rather than raw performance power.
The main advantage that Intel touts vs. Tesla is that because MIC is just a bunch of x86 cores, it’s easy for users to port their existing toolchains to it. (When using Tesla, researchers must port to NVIDIA’s proprietary but well-loved CUDA platform.)
Granted, the vast majority of us will never see, let alone use, this thing. But someone will do something great with this thing. [Intel via Ars Technica]