Tech giant Intel recently unveiled the 72-core Xeon Phi, its ultra-powerful processor aimed at high-performance computing and machine learning. As part of its marketing strategy, Intel pitted the Xeon Phi against some of the most powerful graphics processing unit currently in the market. As expected, the Xeon Phi passed the competition with flying colors.

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Xeon Phi was Intel's first foray into the graphics processing unit market. It was a byproduct of Larrabee, a project that was abandon in 2009 after it was plagued by several delays.

With the new products under the Xeon Phi banner, Intel is focusing on machine learning, a field currently dominated by powerful graphics processors mostly from Nvidia.

Intel claims that the 72-core Xeon Phi 7290 is the company's fastest processor to date. The chip will in sales in September with a price tag of $6,294; making it Intel's most expensive processor. Intel added that three more Xeon Phi processors are slated to be released in the future, these processors will have 64 to 68 cores.

The new Xeon Phi processors are packaged like conventional graphics cards. This means that it will mostly likely act as co-processors with the Xeon E5 chips as the primary processors. Intel said that its latest processors are now powering some of the world's fastest computers.

Intel Xeon Phi processors have 16GB of integrated stacked memory and can support up to 384GB of DDR4 memory. It has a TDP of 245 watts, and its 72 cores are clocked at 1.5GHz.

The Xeon Phi also packs some of the latest technologies available. It supports silicon photonics, Optane memory, OmniPath interconnects, and field programmable gate arrays. As the PC continues to weaken, Intel is betting big on data centers and confirms that notable server makers like Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will soon manufacture servers running on the Xeon Phi processors.

Aside from machine learning, Intel is also aiming its new Xeon Phi processors for deep-learning systems. In this is the case, the new Xeon Phi chips will mostly likely compete with Google's chips called TPU or Tensor Processing Unit.

TagsIntel, Intel processor, Xeon Phi, 72-core processor, Xeon Phi processors, Intel Xeon Phi