  Three dimensional particle-in-cell laser-plasma simulation is an important
area of computational physics. Solving state-of-the-art problems requires
large-scale simulation on a supercomputer using specialized codes. A growing
demand in computational resources inspires research in improving efficiency and
co-design for supercomputers based on many-core architectures. This paper
presents first performance results of the particle-in-cell plasma simulation
code PICADOR on the recently introduced Knights Landing generation of Intel
Xeon Phi. A straightforward rebuilding of the code yields a 2.43 x speedup
compared to the previous Knights Corner generation. Further code optimization
results in an additional 1.89 x speedup. The optimization performed is
beneficial not only for Knights Landing, but also for high-end CPUs and Knights
Corner. The optimized version achieves 100 GFLOPS double precision performance
on a Knights Landing device with the speedups of 2.35 x compared to a 14-core
Haswell CPU and 3.47 x compared to a 61-core Knights Corner Xeon Phi.
