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This paper is the first place I've found a production use of Knights' Landing / Xeon Phi, the Intel massively-multicore Atom-with-AVX512 accelerator system, out

by bri3d 4y ago

This paper is the first place I've found a production use of Knights' Landing / Xeon Phi, the Intel massively-multicore Atom-with-AVX512 accelerator system, outside of HPC / science use cases. And for this use case, it makes perfect sense!

ace2358 4y ago
Is that sort of code able to ‘just run’ on their arc series of GPUs? It feels like intel kinda hates AVX512 on the cpu side (or wants to upsell you for it) so I’m wondering if they turned those cards into their GPUs
- zokier 4y ago
  I don't think Arc and Xeon Phi have much commonality at all
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Probably not. Even if the code was entirely reliant on the compiler performing vectorization (i.e. GPU & CPU instruction sets are at very the least nominally very different), GPU programming is quite different even to "lots of little CPUs"-style.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    > “lots of little CPUS”-style Known as “manycore”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manycore_processor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manycore_processor
- bri3d 4y ago
  It seems like Dreamworks had to move acceleration to GPU using CUDA and OptiX instead of SIMD/AVX and Embree - the released OpenMoonRay code supports both. It kind of feels like Dreamworks got burned a little by Intel here - they invested a ton of research effort (alongside Intel) in Embree, SIMD, and Knights' Landing, and then had to add another implementation for OptiX/GPU/SIMT anyway.
aprdm 4y ago
AVX512 is used in VFX for rendering, as well as in tensorflow ?
- jocaal 4y ago
  Yes, the instruction set is quite commonly supported, but knights landing was a hole different beast. The main focus of KL was to maximize AVX512 throughput for use in scientific workloads, but the processor ended up being a business failure.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
They should consider moving to ARM, maybe whatever SiPearl or Fujitsu are currently cooking up. They probably have a mountain of intrinsics written, but it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel are going to replicate the Xeon Phi again.

by bri3d 4y ago

ace2358 4y ago

Is that sort of code able to ‘just run’ on their arc series of GPUs? It feels like intel kinda hates AVX512 on the cpu side (or wants to upsell you for it) so I’m wondering if they turned those cards into their GPUs

zokier 4y ago
I don't think Arc and Xeon Phi have much commonality at all
mhh__ 4y ago
Probably not. Even if the code was entirely reliant on the compiler performing vectorization (i.e. GPU & CPU instruction sets are at very the least nominally very different), GPU programming is quite different even to "lots of little CPUs"-style.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  > “lots of little CPUS”-style Known as “manycore”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manycore_processor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manycore_processor
bri3d 4y ago
It seems like Dreamworks had to move acceleration to GPU using CUDA and OptiX instead of SIMD/AVX and Embree - the released OpenMoonRay code supports both. It kind of feels like Dreamworks got burned a little by Intel here - they invested a ton of research effort (alongside Intel) in Embree, SIMD, and Knights' Landing, and then had to add another implementation for OptiX/GPU/SIMT anyway.

aprdm 4y ago

AVX512 is used in VFX for rendering, as well as in tensorflow ?

jocaal 4y ago
Yes, the instruction set is quite commonly supported, but knights landing was a hole different beast. The main focus of KL was to maximize AVX512 throughput for use in scientific workloads, but the processor ended up being a business failure.

brucethemoose2 4y ago

They should consider moving to ARM, maybe whatever SiPearl or Fujitsu are currently cooking up. They probably have a mountain of intrinsics written, but it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel are going to replicate the Xeon Phi again.