It took Intel 10 years, starting with Larrabee in 2006, to finally produce a MIC architecture that reaches the same level of performance as high-end GPUs: AMD's

It took Intel 10 years, starting with Larrabee in 2006, to finally produce a MIC architecture that reaches the same level of performance as high-end GPUs: AMD's, Nvidia's, and Intel's top chips now all hit 6-8 single-precision teraflops per chip. This will hopefully bring some competition to the GPU compute market which is currently owned by Nvidia. The two main reasons Knights Landing is so competitive compared to the previous-generation Knights Corner is that (1) it doubled the raw compute performance per core thanks to its two 512-bit VPUs (vector processing units) per core compared to only 1 VPU per core for Knights Corner, and (2) it upped the number of cores from 61 to 72 while maintaining and even slightly increasing the clock frequency from 1.25 GHz to 1.3 GHz. All this was possible because Knights Landing is manufactured in 14nm while Knights Corner was 22nm, so its logic gates are 2-2.5x denser. Meanwhile all AMD and Nvidia discrete GPUs are still stuck at 28nm. The only reason GPUs still perform comparably to Knights Landing is that their execution units are simpler and smaller than Intel MIC cores.