Intel shuts down Knights Mill – the last Xeon Phi inspired by Larrabee

Processor giant Intel is in the process of making a new investment in graphics cards, almost a decade after they threw in the towel with architecture Larrabee. However, the fact that Intel gave up graphics cards for gaming did not mean the end for Larrabee, who lived on as a computing card in the Xeon Phi series.

The original design was based on a heavily modified P54C Pentium, which was later replaced by the Atom architecture Silvermont with improvements and support for four wires per core. After being plug-in cards, Intel changed so that Xeon Phi could be used with standard processor sockets on the server side.

Despite further development and continued investments, the products never really picked up speed, at the same time as they had difficulty measuring up against, above all, Nvidia’s plug-in cards in the Tesla series. The problems of launching Intel’s 10-nanometer technology also led to the generation of the code name “Knights Hill” being abolished.

Now Intel announces that the “Knights Mill” of 14 nanometers has reached the road anyway and is End-of-Life (EOL). These are Xeon Phi 7295, 7285 and 7235 with 72, 68 and 64 cores respectively improved Silvermont cores with special optimizations for machine learning (deep learning) and which could be used together with base LGA 3647.

It is worth mentioning that this does not mean the end of Intel’s investments in processors and other computing circuits that are not based on the company’s Core architectures. Intel is in full swing to once again enter the graphics card market with the Xe series, which will be the brand that will be used for everything from integrated graphics solutions to graphics cards and also computing cards for data centers.

The first new graphics architecture is expected to be named Arctic Sound and the successor goes by the code name Jupiter Sound.

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