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AMD was almost sinking till a few years ago, so throwing the little money they had in expensive pipe dreams like this would have been their end. Best they stuc
by ChuckNorris89 6y ago
AMD was almost sinking till a few years ago, so throwing the little money they had in expensive pipe dreams like this would have been their end.
Best they stuck to their strengths like Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs and turned the ship around.
- rbanffy 6y agoProcessors designed for HPC, GPUs and generic server CPUs have different evolutionary forces acting on them. We can be sure AMD did at least some simulations on EPYC about how HBM memory would impact performance on server workloads. It all depends on the workload and demand. AMD can have much larger volume with a part tailored for the space between HEDT and server than with one tailored to HPC workloads. I would love to misuse one of these as my personal workstation (just I would have loved to use a Xeon Phi), but not all my purchasing decisions are strictly rational.
- sitkack 6y agoYou can get a phi for $100 now, live a little. :)
- rbanffy 6y agoI don't want the PCI board. I want a Knights Mill workstation motherboard. Those aren't easy to come by ;-)
- sitkack 6y agoOh yeah, I am with you, I tried to map out what it would take to acquire. Sometimes the parts come up, but the likelihood you could get everything integrated properly and not have a pile of junk is pretty low. Then you have to find a mis-labeled workstation come up, where they just say HP bla-bla and not that is Phi. At least a grand, maybe 2 for crazy old hardware. You could go for a SparcT3, they are fairly cheap but not the massive sea of cores that Knights Mill is. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-HJ8068303823700-SR3VD-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7295-16GB-1-5-GHz-72-Core-NEW/383701862969?hash=item595669ca39:g:SUcAAOSw9hZfTohe https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-HJ8068303823700-SR3VD-Xeon-Ph... Who is buying these? The vendor to show a sale? Is this just for money laundering? I haven't disassembled a Xeon Phi PCIe board, but I wouldn't be surprised if it literally isn't just this same chip in a low profile socket.
- rbanffy 6y agoI think the PCI versions need the host to provide them all the IO services. IIRC, the host loads the OS image and then boots the Phi. OTOH, the early PCIe Phis had SMT4, so the thread count was higher than the latest versions. But... they were Cell PPU-like "threads" in that giving each core a single thread to work would result in overall 25% core utilization - useful if adding more threads results in more L2 cache misses. In that, the latest Phis are much nicer - the individual cores, while not doing SMT4 (or 2), are much better than the first-gen ones. I don't remember any SPARC T3 workstations too. Would have been smart to seed developers with them since before the first Niagara to encourage development for high thread counts, but Sun's management at the time wasn't known for their business acumen.
- sitkack 6y agoI am just saying a T3 server is much more attainable than a Knights Landing workstation. Friend of mine is trying to get an Itanium workstation, expensive and difficult. I think simulators are probably way more appropriate now even though hard-hardware somehow makes things feel real. Every computation is a simulation, why not run the simulator on a simulation engine? https://fires.im/ https://fires.im/
- pdimitar 6y agoQuestion is, is it easy to program and use it in Linux? Last I checked some years ago, I think the tooling was proprietary?
- rbanffy 6y agoIf you want to extract every bit of advertised performance, you'd probably be better off with Intel's proprietary compilers. If you can accept a little less, it runs fine with clang and gcc. It just looks like a lot of x86 cores with AVX512.