
Intel Announces Xeon Phi Co-Processors - mrb
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6017/intel-announces-xeon-phi-family-of-coprocessors-mic-goes-retail
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samlittlewood
Note: the instruction set and open source software stack are available:

[http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/06/05/knights-
cor...](http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/06/05/knights-corner-open-
source-software-stack/)

[http://software.intel.com/en-
us/forums/showthread.php?t=1054...](http://software.intel.com/en-
us/forums/showthread.php?t=105443)

~~~
ilaksh
So this means that each core is running its own version of Red Hat or some
other Linux? Does that mean that I can install my own software on those ah,
tiny machines?

Someone may probably get mad or think I am stupid for asking this, but can I
install node.js on each core?

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raverbashing
It's probably going to be a small RTOS in each core

Or like it's done in PS3, where you have one core scheduling the others

"but can I install node.js on each core?" maybe, but that's really not the
idea

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ilaksh
ok whats the idea then, how am I supposed to program the tiny machines/cores?

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PopaL
Have a look at OpenCL, I think you will use OpenCL or a similar framework to
code for this device.

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augustl
Seems like the tl;dr is: 50+ x86 cores with RAM and CPU soldered to PCIe
boards.

In other words, a mix of CPU and GPU. A standard architecture, as opposed to
GPU private architectures, many cores, and faster memory pipelines.

Now, where did I put that functional programming book..

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ken
Hmm, the Mac Pro has Xeon processors and PCIe slots. People were complaining
just recently about the lack of Mac Pro updates.

I assume some of Apple's professional video tools, at least, are CPU-bound.
They'd probably love to have an "add 50 more processors" option for Mac Pros.

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wmf
The Phi cores are really slow unless you use the SIMD unit; the typical way to
do that would be OpenCL, but you can run OpenCL code faster on your GPU.

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nemo1618
Okay, I'm a little confused. What exactly is a Co-Prossessor? It looks like a
graphics card. Will it replace the graphics cards or work alongside it? Does
it only handle highly parallel tasks, with the processor handling serials
tasks?

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Symmetry
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprocessor>

Yes, the idea is that you will offload highly parallel tasks to it while the
main CPU handles serial tasks.

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pjscott
While we're adding relevant Wikipedia links,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing>

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padobson
If Xeon Phi is going to run linux out of the box, then that's Intel basically
declaring that they want this card to be supported by the opensource community
from day one, correct?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the Xeon Phi is only going to
be useful to open source developers early on, and then as libraries are built
that make use of the Xeon Phi, application developers will be able to build on
top of those libraries. So we're probably a long way off (and likely a few
different shifts in co-processor technology) before a card like this is useful
to the typical, end user.

~~~
wmf
Realistically Intel is going to provide the libraries like the OpenCL runtime.

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TheBoff
Little low on technical detail. "Works synergistically with Intel(R) Xeon(R)
Processor", honestly!

Interesting though: will it be developed into a graphics board, returning to
Larabee? What will NVidia and AMD (ATI) do in response?

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ihowlatthemoon
Looks like Intel is trying to attack the CUDA/Stream market. I'm curious to
see how NVidia and ATI will respond.

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koide
s/ATI/AMD/

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rbanffy
Now, I'd love to see one with hardware-assisted transactional memory like the
newest POWER machines. A standard HTM implementation for x64 ISA machines
would be a huge leap forward.

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spitfire
The future "Haswell" chips are going to have support for transactional memory.

No news on these guys though. Give it time. In a few years these things will
be getting up to speed in features/RAS and such.

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nivertech
Xeon works "synergistically" with Xeon Phi ;)

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kruhft
Any word on what the cost of this card will be?

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seanp2k2
The 80s called. They'd like their co-processors back!

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rbanffy
I'm quite sure my Apple II didn't have 50+ cores.

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hyperbovine
That would be a funky looking apple...

