We cannot hide that we were quite shocked with Geforce GTX Titan Z announcement and the price of that card. The $2999 Geforce for science community and some super rich gamers sounded quite expensive to us. Then we saw that Intel has launched its new Xeon Phi Co-processor that is a compute card that sits in PCIe servers. The new addition to Xeon Phi Co-processor 57, 60 and 61 is called 7120A and is based on 22nm Knights Corner architecture.

For those who are with us for a few years, Knights Corner is a successor to failed Larrabee graphics card / server compute card. The latest addition to Knights Corner, the Xeon Phi 7120A has 61 cores, supports 244 Threads and comes with massive 16GB of memory with maximum bandwidth of 352 GB/s. It is a 300W card and A stands for Active cooling. There is a 7120p version based on passive cooler, 7120D based on dense form factor and the 7120X doesn’t come with a cooler. The peak double precision performance for 7120 cards is 1208 Gigaflops (1.208 Teraflops) compared to Tesla K10's 1.43 Teraflops.

 

All Xeon Pri 7120 variations clocked at 1.238 GHz with all 61 cores and the price varies between $4,129and $4,235 which is much more than the Geforce GTX Titan Z. The 7120 series even supports turbo that can get the cards to 1.33GHz, a slight speed increase for 61 cores with impressive 30.5 MB shared cache (512 KB per core).

Nvidia's Tesla K40 professional compute solution with 12 GB memory is listed for $4760 and we can imagine that possible dual GK110 based Tesla will cost even more but offer significant performance boost.

This is not that much of money for GPGPU compute market, where you need thousands of dollars to set up a decent compute server.