Today, Intel made two fairly large announcements simultaneously with the announcement of their Omni Scale Fabric and the integration of it into their next generation of Xeon Phi chips. Additionally, Intel has worked with Micron to enhance Knight’s Landing with high-performance on-package memory. This on-package memory is also known as Hybrid Memory Cube or HMC.

The Knight’s Landing next generation Xeon Phi product announced today will use Intel’s Silvermont CPU architecture which is modified (or as Intel says, enhanced) for HPC. The expectation that Intel is setting is that these cores will deliver three times the single threaded performance of the previous generation and still be Intel Xeon Binary compatible.

Knight’s Landing – MCDRAM

As for the on-package memory itself, the HMC, it will support up to 16GB at launch while only taking up 1/3 the space (compared to Knight’s Landing vs Knight’s Corner) compared to GDDR5. They are also claiming five times the bandwidth compared to DDR4 using the same amount of memory. However, to be fair, this 5x bandwidth comparison versus DDR4 isn’t necessarily a fair one since DDR4 is still in its infancy and a more appropriate comparison would be DDR5 since DDR3 in servers is fairly slow. Intel and Micron are also claiming 5x the power efficiency when compared to GDDR5, based upon comparisons between Knight’s Landing and Knight’s Corner (the previous generation). But do keep in mind that Micron says they will only be shipping 2GB and 4GB parts this year, making the 16GB parts for Knight’s Landing 2015 parts.

Knight’s Landing – MCDRAM

The Omni Scale Fabric from Intel is designed to deliver maximum bandwidth and scalability between Intel’s future Xeon and Xeon Phi products. With interoperability between Knight’s Landing and Xeon processors coming with the 14nm generation of Xeon server processors. This Omni Scale Fabric will have PCIe adapaters, edge switches, director systems, Intel’s own silicon photonics and open software tools. All of these are designed to make the upgrade to Intel’s Omni Scale Fabric less painful.

Omni Scale Fabric

In terms of performance, Knight’s Landing will deliver “3 TFLOPS of peak theoretical double-precision performance” which is based on preliminary and “expectaionts of cores, clock frequency and floating point operations per cycle.” Which really means that this hasn’t really been benchmarked exactly quite yet and we will have to see what the end product delivers when Intel actually starts shipping commercial systems in the second half of 2015.

There is also already an operational supercomputer using Knight’s Landing in their system and that’s NERSC’s Cori supercomputer which already employs Knight’s Landing and has already benchmarked the performance at over 3 TFLOPs per Knight’s Landing node.

NERSC

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As Computex is getting ready to open its doors in and around Taipei, the capital of Taiwan – more products are leaking to the surface. Thanks to a Spanish e-tailer PCComponentes, we learned of one such product coming to the market comes from the States, in the form of Crucial’s Solid State Drive (SSD).

Crucial’s Retail box for the MX100 SSD

MX100 line of SSDs will mark the beginning of the end for memory chips produced using the 20nm process. While the 128GB drive will carry the 20nm MLC NAND memory chips, 256GB and 512GB models will feature brand new 16nm NAND flash from Micron. According to Micron,

“Our 16nm NAND technology is not only the leading Flash process, but it is also the most advanced processing node for any sampling semiconductor device. It improves on our award-winning planar cell design to create a highly compact storage solution.

Our advanced 16nm technology is also enabling a new 128Gb MLC device for applications that demand high-capacity storage in small form factors— including consumer SSDs, removable storage (USB drives and Flash cards), tablets, ultrathin devices, mobile handsets, and data center cloud storage.”

Micron’s 16nm MLC NAND Flash memory chip

Translated into regular English, a single 16nm chip features no less than 16GB of storage space. Should you wish to integrate this into an ultrabook of the latest type, you’ll be pleased to know that the drive in fact is a 7mm thick 2.5″ drive, featuring an 9mm adapter as well (if you buy a retail packaged unit).

The company stayed clear of LSI / Avago / Seagate / SandForce one more time, and utilizes Marvell’s 88SS9189 controller. This means the drive will connect using a convetional SATA-III (6Gbps), meaning the drive cannot achieve higher transfer speed than 600MB/s up and down. Naturally, the real stated numbers are far lower than that.

All three drives are capable of sequential reading of 550MB/s. Write speeds vary by drive (given the amount of memory chips used for the drive). 128GB SSD comes with the smallest number of NAND flash chips and it achieves barely 150MB/s write, while 256GB drive tops at 330MB/s. The big hitter is the 512GB model, with 500MB/s write speed.

These drives won’t be fastest in the class, but the 16nm process might help 256 and 512GB drives to achieve longer life span.

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