4 ms·

That's really sad, I always wanted to get my hands on some of these. For certain tasks (that work poorly on GPUs in the same cost ballpark, particularly ones t

That's really sad, I always wanted to get my hands on some of these. For certain tasks (that work poorly on GPUs in the same cost ballpark, particularly ones that require large amounts of local memory bandwidth) they had rather excellent price / performance ratios. But I guess that didn't coincide with what people wanted.

shaklee3 8y ago
The tools killed it. By all accounts it was terrible to program for. It wasn't as simple as writing a standard x86 piece of software.
- TheCondor 8y ago
  Well, for good performance, no it’s not like your desktop. The first generation or two were more like packaging experiments, like a toolkit for developing specialized silicon parts. Like things you’d sort of prototype on a phi and then build custom silicon for and if you used intels custom shop, maybe your firmware would be done. Or something like that. That is my guess, I think if I was intel, I’d be thinking of ways to corner the custom accelerator market as that’s where it looks like things are going. Phi lacked fpga type stuff though. I think the deep learning stuff really took over though and people wanted phis for other things that it just doesn’t fit. It’s an even more odd looking beast through those lenses.
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    Intel's problem has always been the libraries in the hpc world. Nvidia understood this early on, and they dumped an ungodly amount of money into getting people onto their platform by investing in libraries and tools. Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores and not a whole lot of accompanying Library support would do the trick. Their mkl library is a good example of that. There are a bunch of different ways/libraries to accomplish the same task, and it's not always clear which to use. Further, the documentation is basically just an API printout with very few examples. You can't rely on stackoverflow to document things for you. This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      > Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores Atom cores, actually. > This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out. Between 2010 and 2016, AMD reverse-mortgaged their headquarters and fired roughly 20% of their staff. The highly successful "Small Cat" line of CPUs was cancelled (basis for PS4 / XBox One / and Laptops). There was a significant chance they'd go bankrupt. AMD finally makes money these days, which is probably why ROCm is able to get the proper investments that it deserves. But yes, its way late. But their company definitely couldn't afford to compete against NVidia before Ryzen.
      - shaklee3 8y ago
        It's a modified Atom core, and is closer to the Xeon cores. It was the first to have the AVX-512 instruction set, followed by the Xeon.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  reminds me of pre ps4 design, Sony was fond of overengineering with mild tooling, now they're on 90% standard hardware
- nalllar 8y ago
  Only the 72xxF processors are being discontinued, not the PCIE cards. These are compatible with normal x86 code. See https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-phi-x200-knights-landing-boots-windows/ https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-phi-x200-knights-lan...
- Jweb_Guru 8y ago
  That may be (though I think that was more the older models), but I think there's currently basically nothing else on the market that hits the sweet spot it was aiming for. If you want similar or better performance with that much bandwidth and concurrency you are looking at GPUs priced an order of magnitude higher. And if I had been working with them I would certainly have written custom stuff just for the Phi anyway--there's not much point in working with a machine like that if you just want to run the same old stuff, and taking advantage of the resources properly would be difficult without architecting around its design anyway. So while I'd be happy to hypothetically look into some other hardware that was priced and performed similarly to KNL, but had better tooling, I don't think such a thing actually exists.

shaklee3 8y ago

The tools killed it. By all accounts it was terrible to program for. It wasn't as simple as writing a standard x86 piece of software.

TheCondor 8y ago
Well, for good performance, no it’s not like your desktop. The first generation or two were more like packaging experiments, like a toolkit for developing specialized silicon parts. Like things you’d sort of prototype on a phi and then build custom silicon for and if you used intels custom shop, maybe your firmware would be done. Or something like that. That is my guess, I think if I was intel, I’d be thinking of ways to corner the custom accelerator market as that’s where it looks like things are going. Phi lacked fpga type stuff though. I think the deep learning stuff really took over though and people wanted phis for other things that it just doesn’t fit. It’s an even more odd looking beast through those lenses.
- shaklee3 8y ago
  Intel's problem has always been the libraries in the hpc world. Nvidia understood this early on, and they dumped an ungodly amount of money into getting people onto their platform by investing in libraries and tools. Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores and not a whole lot of accompanying Library support would do the trick. Their mkl library is a good example of that. There are a bunch of different ways/libraries to accomplish the same task, and it's not always clear which to use. Further, the documentation is basically just an API printout with very few examples. You can't rely on stackoverflow to document things for you. This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores Atom cores, actually. > This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out. Between 2010 and 2016, AMD reverse-mortgaged their headquarters and fired roughly 20% of their staff. The highly successful "Small Cat" line of CPUs was cancelled (basis for PS4 / XBox One / and Laptops). There was a significant chance they'd go bankrupt. AMD finally makes money these days, which is probably why ROCm is able to get the proper investments that it deserves. But yes, its way late. But their company definitely couldn't afford to compete against NVidia before Ryzen.
    - shaklee3 8y ago
      It's a modified Atom core, and is closer to the Xeon cores. It was the first to have the AVX-512 instruction set, followed by the Xeon.
agumonkey 8y ago
reminds me of pre ps4 design, Sony was fond of overengineering with mild tooling, now they're on 90% standard hardware
nalllar 8y ago
Only the 72xxF processors are being discontinued, not the PCIE cards. These are compatible with normal x86 code. See https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-phi-x200-knights-landing-boots-windows/ https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-phi-x200-knights-lan...
Jweb_Guru 8y ago
That may be (though I think that was more the older models), but I think there's currently basically nothing else on the market that hits the sweet spot it was aiming for. If you want similar or better performance with that much bandwidth and concurrency you are looking at GPUs priced an order of magnitude higher. And if I had been working with them I would certainly have written custom stuff just for the Phi anyway--there's not much point in working with a machine like that if you just want to run the same old stuff, and taking advantage of the resources properly would be difficult without architecting around its design anyway. So while I'd be happy to hypothetically look into some other hardware that was priced and performed similarly to KNL, but had better tooling, I don't think such a thing actually exists.