A Co-processor No More, Intel's Xeon Phi Will Be Its Own CPU As Well

An anonymous reader writes "The Xeon Phi co-processor requires a Xeon CPU to operate... for now. The next generation of Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Landing and due in 2015, will be its own CPU and accelerator. This will free up a lot of space in the server but more important, it eliminates the buses between CPU memory and co-processor memory, which will translate to much faster performance even before we get to chip improvements. ITworld has a look."

Comments

Re:CPU embedded in GPU versus GPU embedded in CPU

[Overzeetop]

Patents already cover most implementations of GPUs within CPUs. But the field is wide open if you start embedding CPUs in GPUs. It's like "on the internet," but with uprocessors.

Fully Baked?

[DragonDru]

Good. The current generation Phi cards are a pain to administer. With luck the new generation will be more fully baked.
- very hot card, no fans
- depends on software to down throttle the cards (mine have hit 104C)
- stripped down OS running on the cards, poor user facing directions for the usage

Anyway, enough from me.

Re:Fully Baked?

[Junta]

I won't disagree about the awkwardness of MPSS, but the 'very hot card, no fans' is because it's meant only to be installed into systems that cooperate with them and have cooling designs where the hosting system takes care of it. For a lot of systems that Phi go into, a fan is actually a liability because those systems already have cooling solutions and a fan actually fights with the designed airflow.

Of course, that's why nVidia offers up two Tesla variants of every model, one with and one without fan, to cater to both worlds.

Frankly, the accelerator card is pretty dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

For a Phi, the selling point is about ease of programming. The memory model of the accelerator card is a pain in the ass, making development more difficult. This on top of the fact that the administration of those are pretty limited and annoying. MPSS is crap for everyone, and one of the critical differences here is that the standalone accelerator might not require Intel to be the linux distribution curator anymore (they frankly suck pretty hard at it).

Intel having a standalone variant pretty much obviates the utility of an accelerator card model for all but perhaps the tiniest usage and makes things far more simpler. Trying to get the same workload to work across Phi and main CPUs is, in practice, more about trying to make the best of an awkward heterogeneous compute situation. While you still can and will run jobs heterogeneous if you do have both Phi and normal Xeon nodes (e.g. a top500 run and... well not much else), it is done using more typical methods of MPI.

In short, this move pretty much let's intel focus on the pieces they *are* good at (making a decent processor) and get away from the stuff they aren't so good at (pcie hosted device, linux distribution design, etc).

80487 coprocessor all over?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 80486 was the first Intel processor with integrated coprocessor, coming at about €1000 (only know the DM price). There was a considerably cheaper version, the 80486SX "without" coprocessor (actually, the coprocessor was usually just disabled, possibly because of yield problems, and still took current).

One could buy an 80487 coprocessor that provided the missing floating point performance. Customers puzzled how the processor/coprocessor combination could be competitive without the on-chip communication of the 80486. The answer was that it did not even try. The "coprocessor" contained a CPU as well and simply switched off the "main" processor completely. It was basically a full 80486 with different pinout, pricing, and marketing.

It was probably phased out once the yields became good enough.