topic A new CPU meant for Virtual Machines in Software Archive

A new CPU meant for Virtual Machines

Tw_Burger — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:16:19 GMT

I was reading an article at Tom's Hardware about the new Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture currently codenamed "Knights Corner".

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/knights-ferry-corner-mic-xeon,11036.html

It has32 x86 cores at 1.2GHz, with four threads per core.

If this isn't intended for virtualization I don't know what is.

A new CPU meant for Virtual Machines

Quoc-Thai_L_Intel — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 07:10:18 GMT

Hi, You can check out the new site for this new processor: https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/high-performance-computing/high-performance-xeon-phi-coprocessor-brief.html?
Regards
- Thai

A new CPU meant for Virtual Machines

Tracy_Camp — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:41:41 GMT

Its not entirely clear if this is a continuation of Labree where if I understood things correctly the individual processors on the die lacked inter-processor cache coherency (requiring external serialization when necissary), or if phi is some sort of evolution of existing multi-core architectures where inter-processor cache coherency is maintained.

I agree its an interesting processor from a virtualization standpoint either way, but its also not clear what instruction sets each core in a phi part supports, so what kind of virtualization software to make it interesting changes quite a bit depending on the answers to the cache coherency and instruction set question. The link Quoc-tahi Le posted didn't seem to contain any actual technical information.