
Intel Begins EOL Plan for Xeon Phi 7200-Series ‘Knights Landing’ Host Processors - ssvss
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13111/intel-begins-eol-plan-for-xeon-phi-7200-series-knights-landing
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rbanffy
Well... It's not to be expected the old processors would remain available
after the introduction of their improved successors.

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seanmcdirmid
What newer HPC product is replacing this? It seems like the Phi might be dead
end, at least for the foreseeable future.

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rbanffy
It's the Knights Mill family -
[https://ark.intel.com/products/series/132784/Intel-Xeon-
Phi-...](https://ark.intel.com/products/series/132784/Intel-Xeon-
Phi-72x5-Processor-Family)

~~~
kev009
These seem pretty insane, you'd be better off with two POWER9s in just about
any dimension including cost, TDP, thread count, cache, memory bandwidth, I/O
bandwidth including PCIe lanes, FLOPS and integer performance.

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mkj
The power9 chips don't have gigs of memory locally attached do they? Knights
Mill has 16G/socket it looks like.

Knights Mill without an apostrophe - Mill is a verb?

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kev009
With CAPI (cache coherent interconnect) I don't see why you couldn't do this
in a more open way. i.e. optane, HBM2, whatever comes next

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Jweb_Guru
That's really sad, I always wanted to get my hands on some of these. For
certain tasks (that work poorly on GPUs in the same cost ballpark,
particularly ones that require large amounts of local memory bandwidth) they
had rather excellent price / performance ratios. But I guess that didn't
coincide with what people wanted.

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shaklee3
The tools killed it. By all accounts it was terrible to program for. It wasn't
as simple as writing a standard x86 piece of software.

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TheCondor
Well, for good performance, no it’s not like your desktop. The first
generation or two were more like packaging experiments, like a toolkit for
developing specialized silicon parts. Like things you’d sort of prototype on a
phi and then build custom silicon for and if you used intels custom shop,
maybe your firmware would be done. Or something like that. That is my guess, I
think if I was intel, I’d be thinking of ways to corner the custom accelerator
market as that’s where it looks like things are going. Phi lacked fpga type
stuff though.

I think the deep learning stuff really took over though and people wanted phis
for other things that it just doesn’t fit. It’s an even more odd looking beast
through those lenses.

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shaklee3
Intel's problem has always been the libraries in the hpc world. Nvidia
understood this early on, and they dumped an ungodly amount of money into
getting people onto their platform by investing in libraries and tools. Intel
thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores and not a
whole lot of accompanying Library support would do the trick.

Their mkl library is a good example of that. There are a bunch of different
ways/libraries to accomplish the same task, and it's not always clear which to
use. Further, the documentation is basically just an API printout with very
few examples. You can't rely on stackoverflow to document things for you.

This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until
recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important --
long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.

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dragontamer
> Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores

Atom cores, actually.

> This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until
> recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important
> -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.

Between 2010 and 2016, AMD reverse-mortgaged their headquarters and fired
roughly 20% of their staff. The highly successful "Small Cat" line of CPUs was
cancelled (basis for PS4 / XBox One / and Laptops). There was a significant
chance they'd go bankrupt.

AMD finally makes money these days, which is probably why ROCm is able to get
the proper investments that it deserves. But yes, its way late. But their
company definitely couldn't afford to compete against NVidia before Ryzen.

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shaklee3
It's a modified Atom core, and is closer to the Xeon cores. It was the first
to have the AVX-512 instruction set, followed by the Xeon.

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biztos
Nice to see Yolo County get some love.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Landing,_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Landing,_California)

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biztos
I didn't expect upvotes for this but I'm surprised by the downvotes.

Anybody care to tell me what's wrong with commenting on the name of the
processor series when that name is in the headline?

(And Knights Landing is a lovely little place which most people who aren't
from Northern California may never have heard of. Worth a visit, especially if
you fish.)

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adwn
Because it's off-topic. Same as commenting on Java the island on an article
about the JVM.

(I didn't downvote you, though)

