 64 cores, 256 threads, running at 1.3 to 1.5 GHz with 32 megabytes of cache. Meet the Knights landing, Xeon Phi, one of the most insane CPUs in the world. How insane? Well, how does a theoretical two and a half teraflop sound? Got no context for that? Don't stress. It's like a lot. Like, look how big this thing is. I could take over the world with this sort of power. But first I need to pay the bills, which is why today's video is brought to you by TunnelBear. TunnelBear makes it easy to privately and securely browse a more open internet. Try TunnelBear for free at TunnelBear.com slash LTT. So some background information is in order here, as this is no ordinary CPU. Knights Landing is the current generation of Xeon Phi, Intel's version of what's referred to as a many core processor, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's built around the idea of trading off per thread performance for an obscene number of threads and maximum throughput. With the theory being that a simpler scaled down core design can dramatically scale up in number while still utilizing existing tools. So we can actually trace Knights Landing's lineage back to Project Larrowbee, first unveiled in mid 2008 as a GPU designed around the x86 architecture. Intel even announced their intent to release a consumer graphics card version of it back in 2010. But since nobody is talking about dedicated team blue graphics cards today, you should probably realize that that never launched. So Xeon Phi is what rose from the ashes of that project. First appearing in 2012 as a PCI Express add-in card codenamed Knights Corner. And it actually did end up getting used in what was the world's fastest supercomputer until June 2016. The newest revision though, Knights Landing, looks a little different. It launched last year and unlike Knights Corner, it works exclusively in the LGA 3647 socket that high-end Xeon pearly CPUs also slot into. So adding support for AVX 512 and its many extensions gives Knights Landing a lot of flexibility in its target market. So then, who's the target market? I'm glad you asked. Uses for this include protein folding simulation, weather prediction, AI and neural network research and development, and molecular simulation. With libraries like TensorFlow and the UIUC's NAMD being able to take advantage of it as well as GPU acceleration. Okay then Linus, so why do you have one? Um, I guess because Super Micro pulled a rookie mistake and sent it to me. I mean, obviously all I was gonna do was game on it. And I'm actually kidding about that. At 1.3 GHz, I can tell you guys right now without firing up a single benchmark what the gaming performance will look like. Like that. As for productivity though, yeah, right out of the gate it falls flat on its face. Coming in at under half of Core i9s and nearly a third of Threadripper's score in 7-Zip, and Cinebench, CPUMark and RealBench not looking much better. Even Blender, a conventionally multi-core friendly benchmark sees terrible performance given the $1,900 price tag for the chip alone. So no, these results won't do it all. Xeon PHY is clearly unlike anything we've ever tried to benchmark before. You'd need like a PhD or something to properly evaluate this thing. Which is where Dr. Kinghorn, our friend over at Puget Systems, comes in. As a chemist and mathematician, Dr. Kinghorn is no stranger to high level computation like this. And agreed to remote into our Knight's Landing workstation and do some of the testing for us. While also running his own 14-core Xeon 2690v4 workstation through the same suite to give us a point of comparison. The results? Actually pretty surprising. In Linpak, the higher core clock of the traditional Xeon gives it an edge in smaller problem sizes. But beyond 5,000, the tables turn dramatically. With the Molecular Dynamics Library NAMD, things seem to scale predictably with the number of atoms being simulated, and all the tests wind up being far less favorable to the Xeon PHY. The greatest gains in this benchmark actually come from dedicated compute GPUs. Though, that is fine for the PHY these days, since it sits in a socket now instead of taking up valuable PCIe slots. TensorFlow neural networks bring things back though into the Xeon PHY's wheelhouse. Especially in batch sizes larger than 64. So Xeon PHY takes a significant lead over its traditional Xeon cousin, but it should be noted that both of them get creamed by a GPU. Further highlighting the importance of large banks of compute GPUs for tasks like these. Though that doesn't mean that Xeon PHY is useless. Its dramatically better performance than a standard Xeon makes it great for supplementing GPU compute in workloads like these. Which brings us neatly to the conclusion then. Not quite as good as a GPU for tasks that can be accelerated. Far better than a traditional Xeon though, in most. And finally, utterly worthless for just about anything on the Windows desktop. I was actually surprised to see Windows even install. We ended up needing a server version of Windows to see all the cores. But that is sort of irrelevant anyway. Because this is intended for use in supercomputers where like, massive nodes of these things can all work together to solve complex problems along with the banks of GPUs that accompany them. I mean, you're almost certainly not going to be buying anything like this personally anytime soon unless you're like a, you like to science for funsies. With that said though, you, yes you, are very likely to benefit from the work being done using hardware like this and we're glad we got the opportunity to play with it. It was fun. Speaking of things that are fun, it's fun to tell you guys about Squarespace. And thank them for sponsoring this video. Squarespace has 24x7 support via live chat so anyone can create a beautiful, functional website in just a few minutes if all you want is like a one page online presence. That's their cover pages feature. And they've got tons of other great features as well, including their logo designer, the ability to publish in the Apple News format, and not to mention that the whole creation tool is cloud based, so it's always up, you can access it from anywhere, and updating your site is as simple as like dragging over some pictures, clickety clacking some text, and you are ready to rock. Squarespace starts at just 12 bucks a month and you can start a trial with no credit card required by heading to the link in the video description, squarespace.com forward slash LTT. And when you decide to sign up for Squarespace forever, you can use offer code LTT to get 10% off on your first purchase. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured, if you like work at a university or something. It's like, I'll know that's what happened if like, you know, 2000 Xeon PHYs show up on like our Amazon report or whatever. Anyway, the point is also in the description is our merch store as well as our community forum, which you should totally join.