Re:Using Intel’s Xeon Phi for Brain Research Visualization
by Klinky on Sunday July 31, 2016 @05:46PM
(#12199050)
It's is rather silly for Phi to be positioned as "it's just like x86, oh wait except for needing to use special SIMD instructions to get max performance". Kind of like Atom being x86 for ultra mobile platforms, just not being able to match the power/performance of ARM. Once you start sacrificing things to maintain x86 compatibility, you really loose its benefits.
Re:Using Intel’s Xeon Phi for Brain Research Visualization
by slededit on Tuesday August 02, 2016 @01:01PM
(#12211347)
You really do need these changes to get max parallelism though. Where it shines is situations where you'd otherwise be porting to a GPU. On the Phi its a recompile and adding a few intrinsics to your inner loops. This is much faster than getting reasonable performance on a heterogeneous architecture and you don't have to micro-manage the slow PCIe link between the CPU and the GPU.
This reverses the last 20 years where intel made inroads into the datacenter and there were few fundamental differences between xeons and their desktop brethren (the i5/i7 etc). Intel will have vastly different ISAs on server and client this coming generation (desktop is not getting AVX512). I suspect the storage layer to get bifurcated as well, since its unclear if clients will see much benefit from things like xpoint. In short client side the only tangible gains that seem to benefit off late are - will the hardware change improve battery life, will it enable thinner form factors and will it make a browser run measurably faster. I watch with great interest how Intel will push adoption of hardware features going forward on the client.