[rbanffy]

I would love to see Intel tweaking the Phi line with asymmetric cores like some ARMs do. Having a couple brawny proper Xeon cores and a bunch of smaller 4-thread cores, all coupled with local HBM (and maybe some dedicated HBM for each core) would make it a very versatile part that, with some tuning in number of cores, cache sizes, HBM size, etc, could cover from low-end server all the way to supercomputing.

I don't think there is much doubt core count will increase on all segments and that asymmetric core tech that's currently used in ARM is pretty cool.

[gnufx]

Do HPC-oriented ARMs do that?

I don't see the advantage of mixing Phi and SKX cores. Just use an appropriate balance of different nodes (maybe not all Intel).

[rbanffy]

It makes sense for multi-node machines, much like we do some tasks mostly on CPUs and others on GPUs within a single node. A processor like this makes much more sense on desktops and general-purpose servers, as most of the time my Xeon cores are doing things an Atom would be perfectly capable of doing at a fraction of the power consumed. This translates into more heat and more cooling. If you consider a Xeon Phi uses 300 Watts for 256 threads, this translates roughly to 1.2 W per thread, which is well within what I would expect from a very puny Atom core. Being able to power down most of my computer while, say, I write this, would be a very nice feature.