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Colfax Ninja desktops roar with Intel's 72-core Knights Landing supercomputing chip

[Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 12,262
in Hardware
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Comments

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,531
    So basically, it's kind of like a GPU except that it's slower and more expensive?  It looks like a ridiculous product unless you have a workload that, for whatever reason, fits nicely on a Xeon Phi but doesn't fit on GPUs.

    Having Xeon Phi plus GPUs would strike me as a very strange thing to do unless you've got a really weird workload.  If you're offloading most of the computations to GPUs, why are you getting a Xeon Phi rather than an ordinary Xeon?
  • CleffyCleffy Member RarePosts: 6,414
    Most render farms will find this useful at that price, although 72 is an odd number.
  • HrimnirHrimnir Member RarePosts: 2,415
    Quizzical said:
    So basically, it's kind of like a GPU except that it's slower and more expensive?  It looks like a ridiculous product unless you have a workload that, for whatever reason, fits nicely on a Xeon Phi but doesn't fit on GPUs.

    Having Xeon Phi plus GPUs would strike me as a very strange thing to do unless you've got a really weird workload.  If you're offloading most of the computations to GPUs, why are you getting a Xeon Phi rather than an ordinary Xeon?
    I agree, while there are SOME workloads that do better on CPU than GPU, there's not a lot of them.

    "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

    - Friedrich Nietzsche

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,531
    Xeon Phi doesn't just need a workload that does better on CPU than GPU.  Any intrinsically single-threaded work fits that description.  It also needs a workload that fits better on a Xeon Phi than on an ordinary Xeon.  That doesn't just mean scaling well to huge numbers of CPU cores.  It also means not needing the fancy scheduling tricks that ordinary Xeon CPUs use to get high performance.  If each thread is running scalar code that needs the sort of fancy tricks that makes it not fit a GPU well, then a Xeon Phi could easily lose badly to an ordinary Xeon.  The Xeon Phi isn't just clocked low; they're based on Atom cores, so they also have low IPC.

    I'm not saying that the Xeon Phi is useless.  But I am saying that someone who buys one thinking of it as just a very fast CPU is probably going to be sorely disappointed.
  • HrimnirHrimnir Member RarePosts: 2,415
    Makes sense.  It was designed around very specific workloads, so it's not generally a great "all rounder".  Honestly though that's really the way these types of products should be positioned. Target a specific market and make a product that excels at that market.  "all around" designs should really be relegated to personal computing and things like that.

    "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

    - Friedrich Nietzsche

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