Joel Hruska over at ExtremeTech takes a deep-dive on Intel’s pending Xeon Phi co-processor based on the MIC architecture. While Intel hasn’t revealed all the details quite yet, Hruska does a good job of setting the stage for the Intel’s battle royale coming up this Fall with Nvidia Kepler.
“The coming war between Intel and Nvidia for the supercomputing market will have a real impact on consumer products, even if it takes several years for the research to trickle down. The HPC industry is struggling to deal with problems of power efficiency, interconnect scaling, storage speed, processor utilization, and communication latency. The mobile phone and tablet markets, meanwhile, are fighting with the very same problems, with the added headache of battery life thrown in. Advances at the top of the market will increasingly shape the bottom (and vice versa). The battle to be the company whose hardware powers both spheres of influence is about to kick off in earnest.
Read the Full Story.