Intel is abandoning the Xeon Phi, announcing the discontinuation of eight models, Intel's Xeon Phi, originally code-named Larabee. Despite Intel's promise that its programming model will be more productive for developers from x86, Xeon Phi has never achieved any commercial success in the market. Meanwhile, NVIDIA GPUs have taken over the supercomputing space, and the latest generation of Volta has destroyed Intel Xeon Phi products.
Intel's original plan was to release a new generation of Xeon Phi called "Knights Hill" on the 10nm process. However, with low demand for Xeon Phi and the ever-delayed 10nm process, this forced the company to abandon the project. Now, the company has announced that it is halting production of eight Xeon Phis that are currently shipping.
Affected are the Xeon Phi 7210, 7210F, 7230, 7230F, 7250, 7250F, 7290 and 7290F, which are socket CPUs with accelerator designs. Accelerator designs that use graphics card-like shapes have been eliminated. Interestingly, the discontinuance notice mentions that "market demand for products has shifted to other Intel products," but these products do not exist at Intel. The company doesn't have any products in its lineup that offer performance or functionality similar to Xeon Phi, and the only successor that can be thought of is the GPU project that Raja Koduri and his team are working on, but it is not expected to be brought to market before 2019.
