Intel is shipping desktops with 72-core supercomputing chips in 2016Mumbai, Nov 20(AZINS) Intel announced yesterday that it's putting its fastest ever processor, the Knight's Landing, into production. More importantly, it' also putting the supercomputer chip into some desktops.

PCWorld reported that Intel is putting the mind-boggling 72-core chip into a "limited number of workstations" for release early 2016. Once the 2nd generation Xeon Phi chip (as it is officially named) takes off, the company hopes PC makers will join hands to sell more of the desktops.

One major feature that makes the Xeon Phi different is that it puts all 72 cores onto a single segment of silicon. A good 16GB of MCDRAM (Multi-Channel DRAM) is added onto the end PCI-E card at launch, suggesting that Intel may even have higher capacities available in the future. But jargon aside, at the end of the day, the chip can process single-precision calculations at 8 teraflops or double-precision at 3 teraflops. And Intel is putting that into desktop units.

Suffice to say, it's not going to be your everyday usage PC, and it's certainly not going to be easy or cheap to get you r hands on. But Intel is trying to get the chip out into the public domain where developers can get their hands on it and fine tune the coding that would be used on these machines.