The Aubrey Isle was a professional graphics card by Intel, launched on May 31st, 2010. Built on the 45 nm process, and based on the Knights Ferry graphics processor, the card does not support DirectX. Since Aubrey Isle does not support DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, it might not be able to run all the latest games. The Knights Ferry graphics processor is a large chip with a die area of 684 mm² and 2,300 million transistors. It features 512 shading units, 32 texture mapping units, and 0 ROPs. Intel has paired 2,048 MB GDDR5 memory with the Aubrey Isle, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 1200 MHz, memory is running at 1200 MHz (4.8 Gbps effective). Being a dual-slot card, the Intel Aubrey Isle draws power from 1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin power connector, with power draw rated at 300 W maximum. Display outputs include: 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort. Aubrey Isle is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface. The card measures 267 mm in length, and features a dual-slot cooling solution.
Intel's MIC prototype board, named Knights Ferry, incorporating a processor codenamed Aubrey Isle was announced 31 May 2010. The product was stated to be a derivative of the Larrabee project and other Intel research including the Single-chip Cloud Computer.
The development product was offered as a PCIe card with 32 in-order cores at up to 1.2 GHz with 4 threads per core, 2 GB GDDR5 memory, and 8 MB coherent L2 cache (256 kB per core with 32 kB L1 cache), and a power requirement of ~300 W, built at a 45 nm process.
In the Aubrey Isle core a 1,024-bit ring bus (512-bit bi-directional) connects processors to main memory.
Single board performance has exceeded 750 GFLOPS.
The prototype boards only support single precision floating point instructions.
Initial developers included CERN, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Hardware vendors for prototype boards included IBM, SGI, HP, Dell and others.