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Last I checked, there aren't any Xeons with E-cores. However, you're right: the most direct competitor to Bergamo seems to be Sierra Forest, a chip that will h
by SloopJon 3y ago
Last I checked, there aren't any Xeons with E-cores. However, you're right: the most direct competitor to Bergamo seems to be Sierra Forest, a chip that will have nothing but E-cores (and no AVX-512).
- adrian_b 3y agoThe Intel "Sierra Forest" Xeon CPUs with E-cores are announced for 2024. Even if they are not branded Xeon, but Atom, there already are a lot of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, e.g. Denverton Refresh, Snow Ridge, Parker Ridge and the recently launched Arizona Beach.
- api 3y agoA chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoImagine if that chip also had HBM memory and fit into a PCIe slot, or maybe had direct-attached high-bandwidth networking. Now imagine Intel had that product and canceled it in 2017, and you will be living in reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
- api 3y agoThey’re fools not to revive that or something like it. Not only would something like 1024 cores with AVX512 be competitive with GPUs it would have the added advantage of being waaay more versatile and easier to program.
- rowanG077 3y agoI actually don't think that would be easier to program. The current thread abstraction won't be efficient with 1024 cores. OpenCL is much better suited for that. But then you might as well run it on a GPU.
- moab 3y agoWork stealing makes it arguably much easier to program than CUDA or OpenCL.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kimixa 3y agoThat versatility comes at a cost though - nothing in silicon is free. It clearly couldn't compete with GPUs in their strengths, and couldn't find it's own niche, which is why it was cancelled. And I'm not sure it'll be that much easier to program - "few large cores" and "GPU waves" are now pretty well supported in the stack with mature tooling - trying to insert a new stack between the two would likely be pretty difficult as it doesn't really fit well with either established paradigm so likely needs something new to show it's benefits.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhat you are talking about has literally came and went. You can probably track one down, buy it and have it in your computer in a few days.
- jgtrosh 3y agoI won a Xeon Phi programming manual at an Intel talk; I can assure you that even though it's easy to program, it is absolutely not easy to optimise. The amount of compiler+profiler+cilk+… tooling Intel had to provide was impressive.
- KolenCh 3y agoIt is not easy to program Xeon Phi if you want to get performance. It is easy to run any application on it, but it is also easy to run it slower than a cheaper Xeon with much less core count. It was a big experiment, and it failed. Some of the brightest people have tried to push it to the limit. In my circle, I have never heard anyone missing Xeon Phi when it is discontinued.
- eslaught 3y agoDid you ever try to use the Xeon Phi? It was hideous to optimize for. The cores were in order. If you've never written code for in order cores, you may not appreciate exactly how heavily you're leaning on out of order to save your bacon. Things your used to just working suddenly don't. The cores had a 2D layout, but Intel refused to tell you what it was and in practice it was impossible to optimize for. You ended up with variable (as in different on every node) latency for memory access that made programming again painful (and add this to the fact the cores are in order, so you really can't work around the latency). Then there was the software stack that was just odd in some ways. I was researching I/O throughout, and things that just work on any other CPU (on any modern ISA) just didn't behave in a sane way. So yeah, I was not at all sad when Intel cancelled it.
- rewmie 3y ago> A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI. A chip with hundreds or thousands of E-cores should be ideal for any cloud provider to offer vCPUs with a high markup. For example, a company like Hetzner sells 1vCPU services for around 4€/month. Even if they don't overprovision and allocate 1 core per 1vCPU, a single chip can potentially earn them 500€/month, which leads to a break even point at around 2 years.
- foota 3y agoWait till you see the memory bandwidth that 1 thousandth of a cpu gets you.