Intel's Xeon Phi solos

The 72-processor core Xeon Phi may beat GPUs at deep learning.

Intel's 72-processor core Xeon Phi now boots stand-alone, rather than as a coprocessor, to tackle any multiprocessing task-especially brain-like deep learning and artificial intelligence. The company says the bootable Xeon Phi scales to any number of processors using its scalable-system framework with integrated on-chip fabric, Omni-Path fiber and silicon photonics. Speed was bumped to 1.5GHz for high-performance computing or HPC orchestration while maintaining its low-power energy budget compared with GPU-based and other competing high-speed multicore arrays tied to PCIe, according to Intel.

"The Xeon Phi is the world's first CPU with integrated fabric in-package," Charles Wuischpard, vice president of the Data Center Group and general manager of the HPC Platform Group told EE Times. "The Xeon Phi is now bootable by itself, has integrated in-package memory and can run on systems as small as developer workstations starting at $5,000. It has also achieved a world record one-socket SPECfp benchmark."

Wuischpard also claimed that Xeon Phi arrays were 1.38 times faster than GPUs (based on 32-nodes running GoogLeNet deep learning image classification compared with a single Intel Xeon Phi processor with 87 percent efficiency compared to 32 Nvidia Tesla K20 GPUs with 62 percent efficiency*). In a 128-node array, the Xeon Phi was claimed to perform Deep Learning 50 times faster than GPUs (based on a GPU running AlexNet*).

To read the full article, go to EETimes.