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Intel gives narrower and faster threads. For some applications it's better than wide slow threads of mainstream GPUs. E.g. Intel's favorite demo of raytracing i
by pandaman 11y ago
Intel gives narrower and faster threads. For some applications it's better than wide slow threads of mainstream GPUs. E.g. Intel's favorite demo of raytracing is a terrible task for a GPU. I don't know if anybody is actually doing raytracing outside demos or if there are practical tasks that call for such an architecture.
- gh02t 11y agoMonte Carlo particle transport is a big application. It's very similar to ray tracing (ray tracing for rendering is really a special case of particle transport, specific to photons with simplified physics), except that the interactions are a lot more complicated. This is a very important task in a lot of HPC fields like astrophysics, nuclear physics etc and it isn't as well suited to CUDA style parallelism because the obvious minimum unit of computation (a single particle) has a lot of branching and data lookups. Phi is probably a bit better suited, though it still has issues with all the data lookups, which aren't very amenable to caching strategies that might otherwise help.
- pandaman 11y agoThanks, I did not know about this. Yes, I figure memory access is still an issue for them since each core runs only 4 threads.