The new Intel Phi 50 core PCIe board

[haarts]

Would a miner take advantage of these new cores without any (or little) code changes?
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/intels-50-core-xeon-phi-the-new-era-of-i/240105810?donkey

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[SysRun]

Sure it will, why not? Will it be the most efficient at it? nope. Does it make sense to try it out? nope.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Would a miner take advantage of these new cores without any (or little) code changes?
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/intels-50-core-xeon-phi-the-new-era-of-i/240105810?donkey

Yes and no.   The cores run x86 and are not OpenCL compatible so the mining kernels would need to be recoded and recompiled.  This is a pretty trivial requirement.

The major killer is cost.   Looking at the specs my total SWAG would be 2 MH/s per core that would be 100 MH/s per board.  At $2600 each it would be hard to compete with GPUs.  Forget about competing with FPGA or ASICs.

Now for LiteCoin.... maybe but unlikely.  Against a real "memory hard" algorithm (LTC was intentioanlly weakened in this respect) it would be powerful and would be a "CPU killer".  Kinda shows how silly it is to put limits on coin mining.  Eventually something will come along.

Say BTC was designed to be really memory hard such that avg GPU barely outperformed the average CPU.  This is like getting 10+ CPU on a board.   You could build a rig with 8+ of these boards and out power 80+ normal CPU nodes.   Technology always finds a way. 

[haarts]

The major killer is cost.   Looking at the specs my total SWAG would be 2 MH/s per core that would be 100 MH/s per board.  At $2600 each it would be hard to compete with GPUs.  Forget about competing with FPGA or ASICs.

How did you get to these numbers?

[DeathAndTaxes]

How did you get to these numbers?

SWAG = Scientific Wild Ass Guess. 

Comparing to Intel existing x86 chips they acheive 1MH/s to 5 MH/s per core.  I split the difference.  Still if it is 5x better it doesn't really change the scenario much.  ASICs are just so massively powerful than if this board had 200 CPU for half the price it wouldn't compare.

[Gabi]

Would a miner take advantage of these new cores without any (or little) code changes?
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/intels-50-core-xeon-phi-the-new-era-of-i/240105810?donkey

Mining on it? It's perfectly doable, and very easy

is it a good idea? NO!

A normal GPU is much much better at mining than it. And in the next month ASIC will be released and they will be the best

The Xeon Phi is a great card, but not for things like mining.