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Intel To Ship Xeon Phi For "Exascale" Computing This Year
MojoKid writes "At the International Supercomputing Conference today, Intel announced that Knights corner, the company's first commercial Many Integrated Core product will ship commercially in 2012. The descendent of the processor formerly known as Larrabee also gets a new brand name — Xeon Phi. The idea behind Intel's new push is that the highly efficient Xeon E5 architecture (eight-core, 32nm Sandy Bridge) fuels the basic x86 cluster, while the Many Integrated Core CPUs that grew out of the failed Larrabee GPU offer unparalleled performance scaling and break new ground. The challenges Intel is trying to surmount are considerable. We've successfully pushed from teraflops to petaflops, but exaflops (or exascale computing) currently demands more processors and power than it's feasible to provide in the next 5-7 years. Intel's MIC is targeted at hammering away at that barrier and create new opportunities for supercomputing deployments."
Yes, but this is the first time they've applied the "tick-tock" strategy without actually shipping the product.
It's more of "they're actually RELEASING it".
Larrabee, essentially, was never released. It was demonstrated, and a few were even given/lent to researchers for testing, but it was never used in an actual product.
That's why it's *still* known only by its codename. You don't need a real name until you're actually planning to put it on shelves.
That's why it's "news". It's transitioning from a *fascinating* research project to a real, commercial product.
For all of the anti-Intel FUD that is about to be unleashed because this thing doesn't play games: The MIC system is *LIGHT YEARS* ahead of any other device in this space when it comes to supporting Linux and open source. This thing is not just compatible with Linux... it actually runs a Linux kernel natively. Intel has already released an open source software stack, and while it will take some work there will eventually be full GCC support for the 512-bit SIMD instructions that give this thing its processing oomph.
Driver? THERE IS NO DRIVER.. Ok there is a rather simple driver that's already been submitted to the Linux kernel 100% open source for transferring data back and forth from the card, but it is about a trillion times simpler than the monstrosities that pass for GPU drivers. This is a *co-processor*, not some black-box video card that where you pass off code written in a quasi-standard format to be compiled (!) by a video-card driver.
This thing is already more open-source and Linux friendly than anything made by Nvidia or AMD (and no, dumping partially completed documentation 6 months after the card is released with no real support is *not* the same thing as *freaking running Linux on the board 100% open-source before the product even launches*).
If people on this site were rational they'd be setting off fireworks to celebrate this architecture, but because it doesn't have the name "ARM" or "AMD" on it they idiotically reject it as "closed source" for some reason....
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
There's a difference in terms of target. Larrabee was initially supposed to be Intel's first shot at being competitive in the GPU market. This reuses a lot of the tech, but it's more like having a bunch of Xeon processors in a PCI-E slot. It's general purpose, massively parallel computing power, which could make it a sweet spot for things like video transcoding or CGI (as GPU solutions tend to be fairly lossy).
The interesting thing about this is that it could basically transform any desktop computer with a modern motherboard into a mini-supercomputer. With two PCI-E slots you can get over 100 CPU cores, which is rather nice as it's all off-the-shelf hardware (well, aside from the probably ridiculously pricey Xeon Phi boards themselves).
It was, sort of.
Modern GPUs are essentially thousands of very simple, low-speed cores. Think of a thousand 486s. They use driver software to make it do the graphics calculations, because that means they can be more flexible. There are no fixed-function pipelines anymore - it's all software, either in the drivers, or in the customizable shaders.
Intel's plan was to make a GPU that has a few dozen (32 or so) more complex cores, that were x86 compatible. They added some specialized extra-wide SIMD stuff and some fast-blitting texture units, but it was still x86 compatible. And they had some very impressive drivers to make it function as a "graphics card" - they even demonstrated real-time raytracing in 2009, something nVidia only demonstrated their cards doing this year (and Intel did it in an actual game, not a tech demo).
However, that flexibility made it a bit underwhelming at the things most games actually do, so it really couldn't compete in that marketplace, at least not at the prices they expected to need to be profitable. But that highly-flexible but also highly-parallel architecture seems perfectly suited to supercomputing.
Can I run regular x86 Windows apps on it or do I need to write it specifically for this chip? I'm thinking rendering applications specifically.
INTEL PROCESSOR RUN HOT!
Maybe my exposure to the real world is very limited ... ... but I have yet to encounter a processor that runs both fast and cool
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
that this is the mystery meat going into those "later next year" promises of something wonderful for the mac pro users?