Intel's Knights Landing — 72 Cores, 3 Teraflops 208
New submitter asliarun writes "David Kanter of Realworldtech recently posted his take on Intel's upcoming Knights Landing chip. The technical specs are massive, showing Intel's new-found focus on throughput processing (and possibly graphics). 72 Silvermont cores with beefy FP and vector units, mesh fabric with tile based architecture, DDR4 support with a 384-bit memory controller, QPI connectivity instead of PCIe, and 16GB on-package eDRAM (yes, 16GB). All this should ensure throughput of 3 teraflop/s double precision. Many of the architectural elements would also be the same as Intel's future CPU chips — so this is also a peek into Intel's vision of the future. Will Intel use this as a platform to compete with nVidia and AMD/ATI on graphics? Or will this be another Larrabee? Or just an exotic HPC product like Knights Corner?"
Re:Bitcoin/Litecoin Performance (Score:5, Interesting)
BitCoin has ASIC miners with ~10X the mining power per watt than most programmable alternatives such as GPGPU and FPGA. Anything less efficient than that is or soon will become cost-prohibitive to run.
The newer Bitcoin alternatives use memory-bound algorithms to prevent such a steep mining power escalation since memory capacity and bandwidth scale much more slowly than processing power but much more quickly on costs: with Bitcoin, increasing throughput by 10X simply required 10X the processing power but with the memory-bound alternatives, you also need 10X the RAM and 10X the memory bandwidth.