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This sounds really interesting, but does anyone know how useful it is in practice? 90 GFLOPS doesn't seem that high compared to e.g. high end i7s, though I imag
by Osmium 13y ago
This sounds really interesting, but does anyone know how useful it is in practice? 90 GFLOPS doesn't seem that high compared to e.g. high end i7s, though I imagine there's a lot of variability in how that's actually calculated.
Also, if it is as fast as claimed, surely 1GB of memory would be a large limiting factor?
- akiselev 13y agoIf I remember correctly, my Xeon E7-8870 server pulled at most 100 GFLOPS double precision. I think high end i7s max out at about 180 GFLOPS single precision. Considering relative costs (and the scale the 64 core can reach) this is really really cheap per GFLOP, both in power and cost. (E7-8870 is 100W and like $4000).
- osivertsson 13y ago...but I can buy an off the shelf $200 GPU (e.g. Nvidia 660) with stable tools that will work pretty good with highly parallel tasks, and get ~2000 GFLOPS according to [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_600_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_600_Series Or is there workloads where the parallella actually would make sense? Power requirements are low, but development environment is probably rough, and development costs (regardless of stack) are going to be order of magnitudes higher than your electricity bill anyway for most projects.
- akiselev 13y agoConsidering the Z7000 series FPGA, yes there are many use cases where this is much better than any Cpu or GPU. it's a really uncommon use case though, and the best use for this board is probably as a developer board for ASICs with ARM IP cores. The benefit of the FPGA, though is that you can use it to add whatever peripherals or even coprocessors you want for your specialized application. It would be awesome to see a 10gbit fiber optic Phy on it.
- zhemao 13y agoI think he was asking about the 16-core co-processor, not the FPGA.
- akiselev 13y agoThe reply above explained it better. Intel CPUs are the equivalent to the ARM CPUs in the GPU solution and the big benefit of the FPGA is feeding data into the 64 core chip without being constrained to PCIe. (The FPGA has DSP cores too so it'll be able to feed processed data from sensors faster than an equiv Intel would).
- vidarh 13y agoA GPU will always beat this for tasks with many data streams and few instruction streams. This is for workloads with many instruction streams, which GPU's do really badly on. And it doesn't much for electricity costs to be important - electricity already makes up a substantial percentage of hosting costs for colocation.
- lauraura 13y agoA 3.4Ghz i5 is only about $200, and should be able to achieve around 326 GFLOPS peak (3 IPC * 8 floats per register * 4 cores * 3.4ghz).
- DanWaterworth 13y agoI don't think it would be useful for problems involving lots of memory. There is relatively little cache and the memory bandwidth seems low.
- zhemao 13y agoSpeed is not the only factor, there's also power consumption and cost. I would hazard a guess that the epiphany co-processor is a lot less power-hungry than a high-end i7.
- dagurp 13y agoThis is just the beginning, they are planning to build chips with a lot more than 64 cores
- rch 13y agoLooks like an excellent first step to me. I've been waiting for hardware along these lines for years, and am glad to see some progress is finally being made.
- eric_bullington 13y agoBut when will have programming languages that can accommodate them? Haskell gives some hope, and Go, but we're no where near where we need to be for mainstream developers to take advantage of so many cores. Any ideas?
- rch 13y agoThere is already a great deal of language support, and having boards like this will certainly help popularize the parallel programming skill-set. Since it looks like there is an integrated FPGA, I'd like to see Dynamic Method Migration[1] make some progress too. Given the libraries, mainstream developers will probably have no problem taking advantage of this class of hardware, using whatever language they might deem appropriate. Of course when I see this board, I think more about nonlinear PDE than web apps... so, how are you defining mainstream? [1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2004.1303105 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2004.1303105 (google the title to find the full text)
- vidarh 13y agoThis is a dev board. It's not built to be fast, but to give people a way to experiment with the architecture. Their roadmap is for 64 core chips next, an they're hoping to scale that to thousands of cores per chip over the next few years.
- wmf 13y agoI think an AMD Temash has similar performance, power, and price and it supports OpenCL.