As an early user of KNL, I don't get the "GPU" bit. KNL runs normal x86_64 code and doesn't look that much different to the AMD Interlagos systems I once used apart from the memory architecture.
It comes from the fact that KNL came from Larrabee which was actually developed as a GPU initially (and even ran games... sort of) but was never actually released. The next revision of that was the Xeon Phi chips you used. So the connection is "Lots of small cores with lots of high bandwidth ram" although these cores are definitely superscalar where Larrabee and derivatives were not really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)