The new Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor optimizes highly parallel computing with its many-integrated-core (MIC) architecture, featuring high memory bandwidth and floating point performance. Intel has dubbed the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor a "supercomputer in a chip" because it offers one teraflop of performance, the same as the first Intel-based supercomputer built in 1997.

This new coprocessor, which plugs into a PCIe slot and features over 50 processing cores, is Intel's first MIC product, designed to work in tandem with traditional processors. Since this chip was built on Intel processor architecture, it can be programmed just like a typical multiprocessor system with Intel's standard development tools.

The first of these new products to be released will be the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor 5110, which is optimized for high density environments and should start shipping on January 28, 2013. The second to be released will be the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor 3120, which is designed for highly parallel, compute-bound workloads and will be available in the first half of the year.

Systems with Intel® Xeon Phi™

Advanced Clustering will be offering these Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors in its Pinnacle Flex two-slot compute node. This 2U-high, 0.5U-wide system is part of our Pinnacle Flex solution, which you can read more about here.