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> A great machine for general computing could do well with a board with 100 x86 CPUs apart from having a big gpu with a thousand cores for brute forcing the "si
by creshal 11y ago
> A great machine for general computing could do well with a board with 100 x86 CPUs apart from having a big gpu with a thousand cores for brute forcing the "simpler" problems.
Which is the idea behind Intel's Xeon Phi "GPU" with 70+ Pentium/Atom cores, which this compiler specifically targets.
[Long before that, Intel showcased an 80 core x86 CPU in 2007 (Polaris/Teraflops Research Chip) – and then promptly shelved it to focus on building programming languages and compilers that can actually make use of it, before introducing the Xeon Phi half a decade later.]
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoThe problem with having 100 x86 CPU on one board is NUMA becomes a bad problem. When memory accesses from one CPU to different regions of memory will have quite different bandwidths and latencies, you're much better off by acknowledging that upfront, designing a proper interconnect (Infiniband), and not sharing memory between threads but rather communicating explicitly (MPI).
- CyberDildonics 11y agoThe next Xeon Phi has an Intel designed interconnect and a layer of 16GB high bandwidth memory between the main memory and the processor.