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I'm not sold on the " 1. Make the most powerful flops-per-watt machine." success. From my knowledge that claim only makes sense for the ever-shrinking domain o
by loser777 10y ago
I'm not sold on the " 1. Make the most powerful flops-per-watt machine." success.
From my knowledge that claim only makes sense for the ever-shrinking domain of applications that haven't been ported to GPGPUs with _simpler_ cores. I also don't understand how the best "flops-per-watt" can be extrapolated from the fact that the Phi is used in top ranked TOP500 machines.
The Phi really just seems like an intermediate between CPUs and GPGPUs in the ease-of-programming vs. perf/watt pareto curve.
- gbrown_ 10y agoCorrect, GPUs dominate the flops-per-watt charts. IBM's Blue Gene systems were also pretty good in this regard but that product line is now a dead end.
- wmf 10y agoHere's the list: http://www.green500.org/lists/green201606&green500from=1&green500to=100 http://www.green500.org/lists/green201606&green500from=1&gre... I see NVIDIA near the top at 4.7 GFLOPS/W and the old Xeon Phi at #44 at 2.4 GFLOPS/W which supports your argument.
- captaincrowbar 10y agoBack in the days of the Itanium debacle, Intel made the mistake of assuming everybody would be willing to rewrite their code to work efficiently on whatever hardware Intel wanted to give them. Instead, AMD won (briefly) by making a 64-bit chip that was much more x86-compatible. Now, though, it sounds as if Intel may be making the opposite mistake. The Larrabee/KnightsThingummy family was built around x86 cores to make it easier to port existing code to it, but now it looks like this time people really are willing to rewrite their code to work on GPGPUs after all.