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I'd bet a Threadripper with 128 GB of memory + NVMe storage would crush a Phi as a workstation.
by lumost 6y ago
I'd bet a Threadripper with 128 GB of memory + NVMe storage would crush a Phi as a workstation.
- dragontamer 6y agoXeon Phi was 2014-era, and had 352 GB/s memory speeds. Threadripper only has ~100GB/s, best case, across its 4x memory channels. (25.6GB/s at 3200 MT/s). Upgrade to Threadripper Pro or EPYC (8x memory channels) and you're still only ~200 GB/s to main memory bandwidth. -------- I'm sure Threadripper has more compute (and cache) than Xeon Phi, but a lot of that is 22nm process vs 7nm process.
- lumost 6y agoThere were 14nm phi's. While there are likely a few workloads the phi performed well on, it's days as a dedicated accelerator were clearly numbered with the increased core counts we're seeing today. The phi only lists at 112 GB/s memory bandwidth. https://versus.com/en/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-vs-intel-xeon-phi-7290f https://versus.com/en/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-vs-intel-...
- dragontamer 6y agoThere were many models of Phi. https://insidehpc.com/2016/01/mcdram/ https://insidehpc.com/2016/01/mcdram/ This one with MCDRAM (aka: HMC RAM from Micron) was well known to hit 400GBps bandwidth. It does seem like this model is 14nm, as you've said. So I stand corrected on the process node for Xeon Phi: 14nm is more realistic representation, at least for the HMC model I was thinking about.
- rbanffy 6y agoI was thinking about the MCDRAM models when I thought about a Phi developer workstation. Having no external RAM would allow a very simple design. It would be no NUC, however - it's still a 300+W part.
- marmaduke 6y agoBets aren't worth much. It depends on the workload. Throughput-wise the Xeon Phi could handle 4-way SMT, so we ran the 68-core KNL node with AVX512 workloads and did quite well, compared to equivalent conventional Xeon nodes.