News Intel throws in the towel on the processors that killed the first Aurora supercomputer — Knights Mill and Knights Landing support removed from LLVM

[Admin]

The last and final play for Intel Xeon Phi: Intel drops support for its MIC x86 processors.

Intel throws in the towel on the processors that killed the first Aurora supercomputer — Knights Mill and Knights Landing support removed from LLVM : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Intel throws in the towel ...

Makes it sound like this is a recent decision. They already discontinued that product line by like 2018 and only kept software support around to fulfill support obligations for existing customers. The warranty terms on most of their datacenter products seem to be 5 years, which would put this withdrawl of support pretty much right on time (since you could still buy Xeon Phi for a while after they announced EOL).

In case anyone forgot, the discontinuation of Xeon Phi marked their pivot to more classical GPU-like architectures for HPC (i.e. Ponte Vecchio):

https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...discrete-gpus/data-center-gpu/max-series.html
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The main problem with those is how absurdly ambitious they were, as if Intel was intent on taking the lead within a single generation. However, in the time it took them to ship it in volume, their competitors got at least 2 generations out the door and Intel ended up having to cancel Ponte Vecchio's immediate successor. Then, with Falcon Shores, they appear to be seriously backtracking on complexity, not unlike how Emerald Rapids is far simpler (at the die/packaging level) than Sapphire Rapids (which also faced massive delays).

Anyway, I digress... I do appreciate what Intel has done with oneAPI (which I've used on my humble iGPU) and I hope they stay in the GPU compute game. IMO, it was already clear that x86 couldn't directly compete with dGPUs like 10 years ago, but that's what Xeon Phi was trying to do.