Intel Announces Xeon Phi Co-Processors

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6017/intel-announces-xeon-phi-family-of-coprocessors-mic-goes-retail

by mrb • 14 years ago

76 36 14 years ago

TheBoff• 14 years ago

Little low on technical detail. "Works synergistically with Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor", honestly!

Interesting though: will it be developed into a graphics board, returning to Larabee? What will NVidia and AMD (ATI) do in response?

ihowlatthemoon• 14 years ago

Looks like Intel is trying to attack the CUDA/Stream market. I'm curious to see how NVidia and ATI will respond.

koide• 14 years ago

s/ATI/AMD/

mtgx• 14 years ago

Nvidia has Project Denver in the making, based on ARMv8, the 64 bit architecture - custom CPU and Maxwell GPU.

samlittlewood3• 14 years ago

Note: the instruction set and open source software stack are available:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/06/05/knights-cor...

http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=1054...

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

So this means that each core is running its own version of Red Hat or some other Linux? Does that mean that I can install my own software on those ah, tiny machines?

Someone may probably get mad or think I am stupid for asking this, but can I install node.js on each core?

raverbashing• 14 years ago

It's probably going to be a small RTOS in each core

Or like it's done in PS3, where you have one core scheduling the others

"but can I install node.js on each core?" maybe, but that's really not the idea

samlittlewood3• 14 years ago

From my limited understanding: each card will appear as a 50 core linux box.

Each core has a set of 16 way vector insns, and there is a little api for synchronization.

ubernostrum• 14 years ago

Think of graphics cards, since they're the most commonplace example of coprocessors. You don't install a game on your graphics card; rather, the system gains the ability to offload graphics processing to the card, in order to improve how well the system as a whole runs the game.

steveb• 14 years ago

Each card (not core) is running an embedded version of Linux. Binaries are almost all linked to busybox. You can mount NFS shares to share data.

The embedded systems need specially compiled binaries. With the Intel compiler, this is usually achieved by turning on a flag at compile time. So yes, you can install and run your own software on the nodes.

augustl• 14 years ago

Seems like the tl;dr is: 50+ x86 cores with RAM and CPU soldered to PCIe boards.

In other words, a mix of CPU and GPU. A standard architecture, as opposed to GPU private architectures, many cores, and faster memory pipelines.

Now, where did I put that functional programming book..

nivertech• 14 years ago

Xeon works "synergistically" with Xeon Phi ;)

nemo1618• 14 years ago

Okay, I'm a little confused. What exactly is a Co-Prossessor? It looks like a graphics card. Will it replace the graphics cards or work alongside it? Does it only handle highly parallel tasks, with the processor handling serials tasks?

Symmetry• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprocessor

Yes, the idea is that you will offload highly parallel tasks to it while the main CPU handles serial tasks.

pjscott3• 14 years ago

While we're adding relevant Wikipedia links,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing

seanp2k2• 14 years ago

The 80s called. They'd like their co-processors back!

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I'm quite sure my Apple II didn't have 50+ cores.

hyperbovine• 14 years ago

That would be a funky looking apple...

pjscott3• 14 years ago

You know that GPUs are coprocessors, right? This is analogous. The cores on here are small, power-efficient, and have a lot of SIMD.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

Now, I'd love to see one with hardware-assisted transactional memory like the newest POWER machines. A standard HTM implementation for x64 ISA machines would be a huge leap forward.

spitfire• 14 years ago

The future "Haswell" chips are going to have support for transactional memory.

No news on these guys though. Give it time. In a few years these things will be getting up to speed in features/RAS and such.

ken• 14 years ago

Hmm, the Mac Pro has Xeon processors and PCIe slots. People were complaining just recently about the lack of Mac Pro updates.

I assume some of Apple's professional video tools, at least, are CPU-bound. They'd probably love to have an "add 50 more processors" option for Mac Pros.

wmf2• 14 years ago

The Phi cores are really slow unless you use the SIMD unit; the typical way to do that would be OpenCL, but you can run OpenCL code faster on your GPU.

padobson• 14 years ago

If Xeon Phi is going to run linux out of the box, then that's Intel basically declaring that they want this card to be supported by the opensource community from day one, correct?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the Xeon Phi is only going to be useful to open source developers early on, and then as libraries are built that make use of the Xeon Phi, application developers will be able to build on top of those libraries. So we're probably a long way off (and likely a few different shifts in co-processor technology) before a card like this is useful to the typical, end user.

wmf2• 14 years ago

Realistically Intel is going to provide the libraries like the OpenCL runtime.

kruhft• 14 years ago

Any word on what the cost of this card will be?

Intel Announces Xeon Phi Co-Processors

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