
A Deep Dive into NEC’s Aurora Vector Engine - rbanffy
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/22/deep-dive-necs-aurora-vector-engine/
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qubex
This is subtle and breathtakingly obvious (in retrospect, now a band of
geniuses have thought of it): reversing the tables on what is the “main
processor” and what is the “accelerator”, and making the customised
computation silicon the baseline resource that utilises the CPUs _if the need
to do so arises_ rather than the other way around.

I am very impressed. And I am also impressed that their next machine will have
ARM processors serving as the CPUs.

~~~
fulafel
Xeon Phi is like this too, and others when you go back in history.

EDIT: In fact the benchmark graphs seem to be comparing against Xeon Phi
("KNL").

~~~
chao-
Slight point of nuance: The Xeon Phi model mentioned in the article is not a
coprocessor. The original Xeon Phi MIC coprocessors, which have been EoL since
2013 or 2014 [0], were known as Knight's Corner or "KNC" for short.

The Xeon Phi which was code named Knight's Landing ("KNL") did ship some
coprocessor models, but these were not adopted widely compared to the models
which function as primary processor for the compute node (in a LGA3647
socket). The KNL coprocessors have also been EoL'd, while the LGA3647 models
have not [1].

So Intel _started_ with this strategy, and then backed away from it after one-
and-a-half generations. Now they are (possibly?) canceling the successor to
even the socketed version [2] and spinning up a compute GPU division. Quite a
winding road in such a short span of time.

[0] [https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/57721/Knights-
Corner](https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/57721/Knights-Corner)

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/11769/intel-discontinues-
xeon...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11769/intel-discontinues-xeon-
phi-7200-series-knights-landing-coprocessor-cards)

[2] [https://www.top500.org/news/intel-dumps-knights-hill-
future-...](https://www.top500.org/news/intel-dumps-knights-hill-future-of-
xeon-phi-product-line-uncertain/)

~~~
sgift
> So Intel started with this strategy, and then backed away from it after one-
> and-a-half generations. Now yet they are (possibly?) canceling the successor
> to even the socketed version [2] and spinning up a compute GPU division.
> Quite a winding road in such a short span of time.

It looks like they search for a product/market fit, kind of like a startup
which starts with one thing and then finds out that something else is far
better and does that instead. Which is usually encouraged here. So, good for
them? They experiment. Maybe they find something.

~~~
chao-
Oh, definitely. My post was not intended to be criticism of Intel. I sure as
hell couldn't offer a strategy to a multinational semiconductor giant and hope
to do any better. Mostly I am amused at how things come full circle: the
Knight's Corner project came out of a canceled GPU project, and now they're
back to GPUs.

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dsign
Wonderful, it sounds like a lot of floating-point horsepower.

I can get a cheap Nvidia card with CUDA support and start playing with it
under the day, but how does an individual developer, or even a small company,
get hold of one of these?

~~~
Sophistifunk
For now, we don't :( These sorts of things are designed to sell in large lots
to people who aren't allowed to test their nuclear weapons in meatspace.

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kjs3
This is the followon to SX-10 core. I really wish NEC would make this chip
more available...the SX is a well understood, well supported, very capable
architecture. They had the SX-6i and SX-8i "deskside supercomputer" versions
in the past, so if they've reduced SX-10 to a PCI-e card, please package it
with a compiler and let us have it.

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baybal2
HPC is 40% iowait, your daily desktop tasks are up to 90%.

More specialised hardware with big on-board caches is an easy way to gain perf

