The First Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor

This article describes the first Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor, known by the code name “Knights Corner”, and describes its architecture, features and uses. The information is presented in an easy to read manner, written specifically for a technically-attuned person. While programming should not be called easy, and neither should parallel programming, this article keeps the fundamentals in clear view: maximizing parallel computations and minimizing data movement. It explains how parallel computations are enabled through scaling (more cores and threads) and vector processing (more data processed at once).