Xeon Phi

[BR0KK]

Its actually 50+ original Pentium cores (think after 486), just shrunk down to 22nm and built with their 3D Trigate design, Not Sandy Bridge at all. I'm sure they've added some extra instructions but still, it's not much more than that.

Yep i read that too. Something about Pentium, if not Pentium 3 or 4.

[mrb]

Its actually 50+ original Pentium cores (think after 486), just shrunk down to 22nm and built with their 3D Trigate design, Not Sandy Bridge at all. I'm sure they've added some extra instructions but still, it's not much more than that.

It is a lot more than that. Xeon Phi implements 512-bit SIMD units, so it can execute 16x more operations per clock than one (non-MMX) Pentium core.

[Lethos]

Have to admit the Intel Phi looks good. However they are hitting a rather small market (Supercomputing), so I hope they are considering very competitive prices, since their competition is GPU's that have performance numbers that match that already.

It's advantage they make out that since it's CPU based it's easier to program for. In supercomputing you aren't exactly dealing with average joe's here, you will be dealing with programmers and scientists with Masters and PHD's, not the sort who are phased by that.

I don't know why Intel did this, is it or not just a form of multi-core CPU? or is more like a GPU?
After all their is a reason why bit coining mining moved away from CPU's, moved up to GPU's and in the next few years will moved mostly to FPGA's I expect.
Supercomputing is on the same path, it has gone more GPGPU powered in recent years.
Intel trying to hold supercomputers back to CPU's based supercomputing I can't see lasting. However this isn't really a normal CPU, so I'll still be interested in some real results.

[BR0KK]

so that is good for mining?

what are the odds we can get hold of one unit? will be expensive and u need some enterprise contacts to by one (not a consumer Product). Like tesla units ....

[Lethos]

so that is good for mining?

what are the odds we can get hold of one unit? will be expensive and u need some enterprise contacts to by one (not a consumer Product). Like tesla units ....

It be good for mining like 50-60 CPU's would be. It can be done, but not a very good idea. I doubt they've improved the architecture and design in these to be more like a GPU enough that it would be a worthwhile thing to hash on. I expect these to cost 1000's like most Fermi GPU's do.

So no, not good for mining.

[Gabi]

It is NOT good for mining. An ATI GPU is probably much much faster.

This thing is 1TFLOP in double precision in x86

No need to mess with CUDA, OpenCL and other fail GPU languages with tons of problems. This is x86. Everything will run on it.

Do you know BOINC? Nice, now buy some of these Xeon Phi, run BOINC and suddenly epic computing power.

[Miner99er]

Its actually 50+ original Pentium cores (think after 486), just shrunk down to 22nm and built with their 3D Trigate design, Not Sandy Bridge at all. I'm sure they've added some extra instructions but still, it's not much more than that.

It is a lot more than that. Xeon Phi implements 512-bit SIMD units, so it can execute 16x more operations per clock than one (non-MMX) Pentium core.

Well, It's built off the same platform Intel's defunct Larrabee GPU design is. You're right about what it can do. I should have posted a more thurough post myself... but below is the wiki for larrabee. I don't think Phi will be any different (sans the graphics capabilities.)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

Edit: Reading though the Wiki on Larrabee... it was going to be a 2 TFLOP card, while Phi is only 1 TFLOP. Wonder what happened.

[goxed]

Edit: Reading though the Wiki on Larrabee... it was going to be a 2 TFLOP card, while Phi is only 1 TFLOP. Wonder what happened.

The 2TFLOP estimate for Larabee is for single precision floating point operation, while the 1TFLOP quoted for Phi is for double precision.

[mrb]

AFAIK Intel targets ~1.5GHz for the Xeon Phi.
So, 50 cores with their 512-bit SIMD instruction set would execute 1200 billion 32-bit instructions per second.
Assuming a core can execute the SHA-256 operations in 1 clock cycle (rotate, shift, add, xor, or, and), and does not have an instruction like BFI_INT to optimize ch() and maj(), then it would take about 4300 clocks to compute a Bitcoin hash.

Given all these assumptions, a Xeon Phi card should mine at roughly 280 Mhash/s, or about as fast as a low end HD 7850. Not impressive.

[BR0KK]

Edit: Reading though the Wiki on Larrabee... it was going to be a 2 TFLOP card, while Phi is only 1 TFLOP. Wonder what happened.

I read something about that they wanted to implement more than 80 (100) Cores, but they failed to do that.

[mc_lovin]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

[rjk]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

[cmg5461]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

If intel made a *working* GPU, I bet it would kick the shit out of AMD compute wise..

[DiabloD3]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

If intel made a *working* GPU, I bet it would kick the shit out of AMD compute wise..

Then why don't they?

[BR0KK]

Cause they suck at ist

[bulanula]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

Helps heat dissipation too  This is not crappy AMD card with plastic cover 

[DiabloD3]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

Helps heat dissipation too  This is not crappy AMD card with plastic cover 

You do realize thats an air channel, right?

[bulanula]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

Helps heat dissipation too  This is not crappy AMD card with plastic cover 

You do realize thats an air channel, right?

Hot air channel will heat up top metal cover by convection ( hot air rises ) and conduction and the metal will get hot up there.

Even the plastic on my AMD cards is quite hot to the touch and not normal room temp. even if it does not conduct heat as well as metal

[crazyates]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

Helps heat dissipation too  This is not crappy AMD card with plastic cover 

You do realize thats an air channel, right?

Hot air channel will heat up top metal cover by convection ( hot air rises ) and conduction and the metal will get hot up there.

Even the plastic on my AMD cards is quite hot to the touch and not normal room temp. even if it does not conduct heat as well as metal

Ur an idiot.

[rjk]

so that's what it would look like if Intel made a GPU

F'n sexy!

Yeah I love the industrial metal look without all the plastic.

Helps heat dissipation too  This is not crappy AMD card with plastic cover 

You do realize thats an air channel, right?

Hot air channel will heat up top metal cover by convection ( hot air rises ) and conduction and the metal will get hot up there.

Even the plastic on my AMD cards is quite hot to the touch and not normal room temp. even if it does not conduct heat as well as metal

Ur an idiot.

Not totally, a metal shroud would conduct more heat, resulting in different thermal dynamics. But I don't know how much of an actual temperature difference there would be.