tviceman
Diamond Member
Hahah wtf there is code built into semiaccurate's articles now that won't allow for highlighting to copy and paste. You have to stop the page from loading before it finishes.
The most pertinent question surrounding Intels new Xeon Phi is not what it can do, but what it does to the competition. In that sense, the card is a death blow to Nvidias HPC aspirations.
In the end, GPGPUs are a work in progress. That is the smiley happy term for the English term, Bloody mess.
The net result is a lot of smoke and mirrors for the money in and the meagre results out.
The usable performance of Phi is laughably higher than any GPU out there, it isnt even a close race. No, it isnt even a race, it is a clean kill.
The difference between Phi and GPGPU is astounding. The hardware is a bit light on raw performance, barely over a TeraFLOP DP while the competition is notably higher. SP FP is a far more lopsided win for the GPU set, they all will crunch multiple times what a Phi can. That said, for a given amount of programmer hours, it would be surprising if you didnt get a better result from a cluster of servers with the Intel cards plugged in than any competing GPU based solution.
With Phi on the market, expect new projects that choose Cuda and Nvidia hardware to wither very quickly. Projects that are already heavily invested in the Nvidia solutions will be unlikely to drop them cold, but if they have maintained an x86 code base, Phis overwhelmingly lower cost of code maintenance, updates, and optimization for the next generation may very well win the day. The difference is really that extreme when you run the numbers with any realistic programmer costs factored in.
The end times for GPGPU is here, pity its purveyors, Intel doesnt take prisoners.