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Before AI it was HPC that was obviously becoming huge. AI is the most recent and buzziest form of HPC, but people have been buying AI-style clusters for a while
by pclmulqdq 2y ago
Before AI it was HPC that was obviously becoming huge. AI is the most recent and buzziest form of HPC, but people have been buying AI-style clusters for a while. The Knights [*] products were a great entry point into that market if they would just figure out the software of it. Knights [*] essentially had Atom cores with huge SIMD units, and fast forward to today, an AMD GPU is essentially a small scalar core attached to a huge SIMD unit.
IMO it seems like they had the Google problem: if you can't sell a billion units it has to be canceled.
- desertrider12 2y agoThat's because Larrabee wasn't totally canceled, it was just pivoted from a gaming GPU to an HPC accelerator in the form of Knights Corner/Landing. The idea of having lots of x86 cores with wide SIMD units didn't change, but it was a lot more successful in the HPC world because anybody could compile an old MPI or OpenMP application with AVX512 and it just worked.
- physicsguy 2y agoTo some degree, but the first cards didn’t really give great performance in practice. By the third gen they were worth it and then Intel cancelled it.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoLarrabee itself was a complete disaster. Xeon Phi resurrected the Larrabee trash heap into something sellable. Sadly, it was never really that easy to program a Xeon Phi.