Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor cards

jdart · Post by **jdart** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 4:26 am

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12 ... or_launch/

Looks like this is mostly for floating-point tasks, but you have to wonder what it might do for mostly integer applications like chess. The higher-end card has 62 cores.

--Jon

mar · Post by **mar** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 8:58 am

Interesting. So they now renamed Larrabee to Xeon Phi? I think it may actually work very well for chess as it's a 60-core CPU (essentially x86 with extended vector instructions as far as I understand).
They originally intended to battle with highly specialized GPUs (it would be truly amazing - imagine what you could do with a fully programmable
parallel CPU - no headache anymore), but it didn't deliver the expected performance.
I wonder what price they'll be asking for it. I bet it won't be cheap.
Another question is of course how well a chess engine would scale on 60 cores, but I can also imagine it would help to test/tune engines a lot.

kbhearn · Post by **kbhearn** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 9:28 am

One of the articles had a list price of the first card they're releasing at $2600.

rbarreira · Post by **rbarreira** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 10:42 am

They're basing their design on Pentium-54C cores, which are almost 20 years old, although apparently each core handles 4 threads, so I guess they changed quite a lot.

I doubt that chess engines will benefit a lot, it's 20x more threads than a regular hexa-core but each thread is probably 10 times slower for branchy integer code. Increasing the number of threads also results in more overhead of course. If the cores are 32-bit that is another penalty.

jdart · Post by **jdart** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 4:06 pm

It is actually targeted at compute-intensive applications and there is even a supercomputer using this chip.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeo ... ,3342.html has more details.

smatovic · Post by **smatovic** » Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:57 pm

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/displa ... Cores.html

makes GPUs more attractive for programming...

--
Srdja

smatovic · Post by **smatovic** » Mon Jan 14, 2013 11:15 pm

http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/cuda-vs ... /240144545

http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/program ... /240144160

1 core can run 4 threads via hyperthreading,
so 240 threads should be running,
the question is how to utilize the 512 bit vector unit each core has...

--
Srdja

Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor cards

Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor cards

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