A couple of weeks ago details of Knights Landing came out. Damn, it's looking nice!
Knights Landing is the latest version of the Xeon Phi project (previous version of Xeon Phi was called Knights Corner), which is a sequel to the Larrabee chip.
The idea with Larrabee and Knights Corner was to place a bunch of old Pentium cores on a pcie board, giving you a massively parallel processing accelerator. Unlike cards such as nvidia's tesla, these are running full conventional cores (with large simd extensions), each of which could run an operating system or any general software (gpu cores are faster, but far more limited in what they can do).
Knights Landing changes that. Instead of old cores, it uses the Silvermont core from recent Atom cpus (except in 14nm). Apparently that gives it much better threading performance. There's 72 of these cores in the package! Remember, each of these 72 cores is a full x86 core.
It's also going to be available as a socketed chip instead of just a pcie card. So you could use Knights Landing as your main cpu.
It also has 16GB of onboard MultiChannel DRAM using Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube technology (ram dies are stacked vertical, with "Through Silicon Vias" communicating vertically between the dies and the controller).
Each core also has an AVX-512F SIMD unit, which can work on 16 single precision floats at a time.
Apparently Knights Landing has twice the double precision performance (3 TFLOPS) of the best Nvidia Tesla board.
Unfortunately, it's not due for commercial release until the second half of 2015.
I'm sure it will cost a fortune, but I'm still excited.
