Xeon Phi

[1l1l11ll1l]

Interesting. Turned the Knights Corner into a PCIe product.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/18/intel-christens-its-MIC-products-xeon-phi/

[1714040338]

1714040338

[crazyates]

The question is: can it mine? 50 cores isn't a lot compared to ATIs thousands, but IIRC, these would be WAY higher clocked?

[rjk]

Cool! Wonder if it will be the Litecoin endgame.

[DiabloD3]

So what is it, exactly?

[rjk]

So what is it, exactly?

50-core x86 co-processor, code named Knights Corner, in a PCIe card.

[Electricbees]

I've been waiting for someone to make something like this...

[DiabloD3]

So what is it, exactly?

50-core x86 co-processor, code named Knights Corner, in a PCIe card.

50 normal cores? And 22nm trigate fab, so its probably some derivative of Sandy Bridge (but with Failabee-like ring busses). I wonder what sort of onboard memory it as and if its considered local memory and normally addressable.

[rjk]

So what is it, exactly?

50-core x86 co-processor, code named Knights Corner, in a PCIe card.

50 normal cores? And 22nm trigate fab, so its probably some derivative of Sandy Bridge (but with Failabee-like ring busses). I wonder what sort of onboard memory it as and if its considered local memory and normally addressable.

Well apparently they are x86 compatible, but I can't imagine that they are totally complete in the sense that they could be used as a main processor. I seem to recall reduced cache and a few other limitatoins.

[DiabloD3]

So what is it, exactly?

50-core x86 co-processor, code named Knights Corner, in a PCIe card.

50 normal cores? And 22nm trigate fab, so its probably some derivative of Sandy Bridge (but with Failabee-like ring busses). I wonder what sort of onboard memory it as and if its considered local memory and normally addressable.

Well apparently they are x86 compatible, but I can't imagine that they are totally complete in the sense that they could be used as a main processor. I seem to recall reduced cache and a few other limitatoins.

Cache isn't the issue, really. But if it still can perform just as well on highly branchy code, I might have a use for one of those.

[1l1l11ll1l]

[Bitcoin Oz]

Someone should make a coin that is optimsed for nvidia hardware...

NCoin lol

[pekv2]

Just ran across this on hardocp.com.

I was post the article till I seen this thread & ask the same questions.

What kind of results would this bring to Bitcoin and Litecoin mining?

[BinaryMage]

Just ran across this on hardocp.com.

I was post the article till I seen this thread & ask the same questions.

What kind of results would this bring to Bitcoin and Litecoin mining?

I would guess nothing spectactular, especially for its likely price point.

For comparision, a 5870 puts out ~2.7 TFLOPS. Bitcoin mining isn't floating point, but that indicates to some degree that this unit would likely have ~150-200 MH/s. (For comparision, one high-end Xeon core puts out around 3-4 MH/s; multiply that by 50)

As an enterprise product, its pricing will be in the multiple thousands at least. With less than 0.1 MH per dollar, this isn't going to change anything.

[goxed]

Mind you it's 1TFLOPS Double Precision.. http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/06/17/latest-intel-xeon-processors-e5-product-family-achieves-fastest-adoption-of-new-technology-on-top500-list
IMO, no single chip GPU has that kind of performance for double precision arithmetic.

[Gladamas]

By "highly parallel tasks" does that include two rounds of SHA-256?

[BinaryMage]

Mind you it's 1TFLOPS Double Precision.. http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/06/17/latest-intel-xeon-processors-e5-product-family-achieves-fastest-adoption-of-new-technology-on-top500-list
IMO, no single chip GPU has that kind of performance for double precision arithmetic.

That makes a difference; I just read the post a few above, not the press release. Still, I doubt this will be a gamechanger.

By "highly parallel tasks" does that include two rounds of SHA-256?

Well, I'm sure Intel would say so, but GPUs are also excellent at "highly parallel tasks".

[tgmarks]

I wonder what the power draw of something like this is.

[goxed]

power draw

I think 200 Watts. Here are some pics, I can see the two 3x2  PCI-E power connectors.

[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.

[John (John K.)]

power draw

I think 200 Watts. Here are some pics, I can see the two 3x2  PCI-E power connectors.
http://cdn.itproportal.com/photos/knightsferry-ins-situ.jpg

http://cdn.itproportal.com/photos/knightsferryrear.jpg

http://cdn.itproportal.com/photos/knightsferry-demo.jpg

I see 8TH of power staring at me. My goodness, won't the cards overheat from being so packed against each other?