Xeon Phi

Xeon Phi is a discontinued series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenMP. Xeon Phi launched in 2010. Since it was originally based on an earlier GPU design (codenamed "Larrabee") by Intel that was cancelled in 2009, it shared application areas with GPUs. The main difference between Xeon Phi and a GPGPU like Nvidia Tesla was that Xeon Phi, with an x86-compatible core, could, with less modification, run software that was originally targeted to a standard x86 CPU. Initially in the form of PCI Express-based add-on cards, a second-generation product, codenamed Knights Landing, was announced in June 2013. These second-generation chips could be used as a standalone CPU, rather than just as an add-in card. The 2013 Tianhe-2 supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ) was the world's fastest supercomputer until November, 2015. It used Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and Ivy Bridge-EP Xeon E5 v2 processors to achieve 33.86 petaFLOPS of performance. The Xeon Phi coprocessors were eventually phased out by the end of 2017 and replaced by custom-built Matrix-2000 coprocessors. The Xeon Phi product line aimed to compete with Nvidia's Tesla and AMD Radeon Instinct lines, targeting machine learning and GPGPU use cases. It was discontinued due to a lack of demand and Intel's problems with its 10 nm node.