No more ring

Eleven years ago, the Larrabee project was started in 2007. In 2010, the company killed the project. Then in 2011, Intel introduced the Xeon Phi, an accelerator card based on the 22-nm “Knights Corner” chip. A vestige of Intel’s ill-fated Larrabee project, Knights Corner was the first realization of Intel’s Many Integrated Cores (MIC) architecture. MIC was a cache-coherent multiprocessor system connected via a ring bus to memory; each core was capable of four-way multithreading; alas, the ring is no more. That is the conclusion drawn from a slide that was part of a presentation Intel presented to students and