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According to the article hendzen linked to, the Phi processors are absolutely general purpose CPUs -- they can be the main CPU on the board and can boot and run
by ScottBurson 11y ago
According to the article hendzen linked to, the Phi processors are absolutely general purpose CPUs -- they can be the main CPU on the board and can boot and run stock OSes.
This is much more powerful than a GPU, which is fundamentally SIMD -- it can hit TFLOPS speeds running hundreds of threads doing different things. While not everyone will need this power, I suspect it will open up entire new classes of applications.
- makomk 11y agoIt still only hits teraflops speed when you're running very wide SIMD code - non-SIMD stuff is a lot slower, probably roughly the same speed penalty as running non-SIMD code on a GPU based on what they've released. Not only that, most researcher's very wide SIMD code is written for CUDA which this doesn't support. Oh, and the AVX-512 instructions required to take advantage of the full speed of this aren't used by any Intel product currently in existence - you basically have to develop code specifically for this board.