Intel Corp (INTC)

[mas]

That's because they are going to use Knights Landing in a standalone socketed form in some of the nodes for bandwidth reasons (and Haswell Xeons in others) so seriously how do you think a tiny individual gpu core would compare with the Silvermont based core in Knights Landing under the same standalone conditions ?

Discrete GPUs were not an option for the same reasons, said Grider, noting, “we probably would have considered this as an option if there was a self-hosted GPU of some kind or higher bandwidth than a PCI bus. Again, if you look at the time we were making these decisions and the chips avail in the timeframe, you’ll see that there’s really nothing else out there right now.”

Kinghts Landing single thread performance should be on a par with BlueGene's PowerPC chip and that was not unduly held back by that. Silvermont is a reasonably strong x86 core with ipc greater than a Pentium 4 so it is all relative.