Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor Architecture and Tools: The Guide for Application Developers

CHAPTER 5

Xeon Phi Cache and Memory Subsystem

The preceding chapter showed how the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor uses a two-dimensional tiled architecture approach to designing manycore coprocessors. In this architecture, the cores are replicated on die and connected through on-die wire interconnects. The network connecting the various functional units is a critical piece that may become a bottleneck as more cores and devices are added to the network in a chip multiprocessor (CMP) design such as Intel Xeon Phi uses. The interconnect design choices are primarily determined by the number of cores, expected interconnect performance, chip area limitation, ...