Intel To Ship Xeon Phi For "Exascale" Computing This Year 77
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from the but-can-it-beat-a-beowful-cluster-of-286es dept.
from the but-can-it-beat-a-beowful-cluster-of-286es dept.
MojoKid writes "At the International Supercomputing Conference today, Intel announced that Knights corner, the company's first commercial Many Integrated Core product will ship commercially in 2012. The descendent of the processor formerly known as Larrabee also gets a new brand name — Xeon Phi. The idea behind Intel's new push is that the highly efficient Xeon E5 architecture (eight-core, 32nm Sandy Bridge) fuels the basic x86 cluster, while the Many Integrated Core CPUs that grew out of the failed Larrabee GPU offer unparalleled performance scaling and break new ground. The challenges Intel is trying to surmount are considerable. We've successfully pushed from teraflops to petaflops, but exaflops (or exascale computing) currently demands more processors and power than it's feasible to provide in the next 5-7 years. Intel's MIC is targeted at hammering away at that barrier and create new opportunities for supercomputing deployments."
Re:Larrabee (redux) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Isn't Larrabee a graphic chip ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Larrabee never really was about graphics, that's only one use. It works like a normal cpu, runs x86 and memory access is not gpu-like retarded. There are 512-bit SIMD instructions to help parallel processing, which is good if you need to render pixels, but sandy/ivy-bridge is closing the gap on it with 256-bit AVX. When haswell comes around (AVX2) with possibly even more cores I don't really see why anyone would buy it, unless it bumps the core count to like 32/64 and adds a lot of cache.
Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I run regular x86 Windows apps on it or do I need to write it specifically for this chip? I'm thinking rendering applications specifically.
Re:Best HPC news for Linux EVER (Score:4, Interesting)
With all due respect, this seems more similar to barebones shader programming than to the usual issues running OpenGL which is why it's "about a trillion times simpler".
Assembler ~= shader programming ~= Xeon Phi programming
OpenGL ~= Java, C#, C++/Qt, C++/Gtk ~= nothing the stack you talk about does
From what I gather this chip essentially gives you SSE on steroids, it's an alternative to CUDA and OpenCL but nothing else a graphics card does. And while currently the Linux capability is just to get the chip up and running, it doesn't actually use the new instructions unless you write it in assembler:
The changes do not include support for Knights Corner vector instructions and related optimization improvements. GCC for Knights Corner is really only for building the kernel and related tools; it is not for building applications. Using GCC to build an application for Knights Corner will most often result in low performance code due its current inability to vectorize for the new Knights Corner vector instructions. Future changes to give full usage of Knights Corner vector instructions would require work on the GCC vectorizer to utilize those instructionsâ(TM) masking capabilities. This is something that requires a broader discussion in the GCC community than simply changing the code generator.
Re:Best HPC news for Linux EVER (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the advantage that RISC has always had over architecture, and why every supercomputer up to date worth speaking of has used RISC over Intel X86.
Well, if you don't feel 87% of the current top500 or half the top 10 aren't worth speaking of then I guess you only see what you want to see. True, the top three are not x86 but they're the bulk of the world's supercomputers.
you don't suppose... (Score:3, Interesting)