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Intel's Xeon Phi Is Being Sold for a Low Price
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- jsnell 12y agoIt is a very aggressive promotion, but I kind of wonder whether there's any chance it'll find a useful target audience. At least when we briefly looked at deploying various kinds of coprocessor solutions, paying the real cost for a development unit would not have been any kind of a blocker. It's just that actually deploying a Phi in production didn't seem to make any sense for us in the end (just like GPU and ASIC based options didn't either). I would imagine that a development unit would not have been an issue for anyone else who has seriously evaluated one of these. Seems like this kind of fire sale would only help in reaching people who need lots and lots of Phis, don't realize it yet, and are susceptible to buying a piece of kit just because it's almost free. (And admittedly very cool). Also, my understanding is that this model is a 270W TDP board with passive cooling. What kind of a machine can you actually install those in?
- 13 12y agoYou're meant to be running these in server rack cases that already have fans in the front. Most server CPU heatsink designs take this sort of form as well[1], as there's no point in putting a tiny fan on top of the heatsink when you've got delta fans at the front blasting air through what amounts to a sealed pipe. I've dealt with GPUs of a lower TDP in a cramped environment and the amount of airflow you need is completely insane, if you ran this without aggressive cooling for more than a couple of seconds it would just ignite. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/yh2oMeh.png https://i.imgur.com/yh2oMeh.png
- pkhuong 12y agoI'm considering Phis for production workloads, and getting the test unit was never an issue. However, I also have some hobby projects that might work well on Phis. There's always the argument that personal projects are preparation for work stuff, but I'd be more comfortable running the former on my own hardware. FWIW, I think I could fit two in the 4-way workstation I left in my parents' basement ;)
- zurn 12y agoA full price board would require a procurement in many education/research organizations, but now you can just buy it through same channel as a spare laptop battery (ask your lab engineer or whatever). Also, think China or India. As for the cooling question, this is designed for rack servers that have a good front to back forced airflow. No doubt people will try various tricks at fan mounting to run in a desktop PC. See one recipe here: http://openwall.info/wiki/internal/xeon_phi http://openwall.info/wiki/internal/xeon_phi
- cpks 12y agoYou'd be surprised at how much innovation comes bottom-up. Someone tries a neat, work-relevant technology for a pet weekend project, demos it, and the company adopts it. There are places with heavyweight evaluation/adoption/etc. processes, but there are more agile ones as well. This kind of firesale does pretty well for that model.
- haddr 12y agogood luck trying to get that in europe...
- rbanffy 12y agoI live in Brazil. Anything is easier than that...
- n0rm 12y agoTR here. :(
- outworlder 12y agoYeap. I expect it would be easier to run into one of these in the Sahara desert.
- comboy 12y agoSorry for being ignorant about politics, but can you elaborate? Why is that so?
- rbanffy 12y agoCustoms. Import taxes are absolutely crazy.
- angry_octet 12y agoPerhaps the insanely low price is because no one is buying the current design in the quantities they naively expected and they have to dump these ugly monstrosities for whatever price they can get before a new architecture is released.
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- rbanffy 12y agoI've said it before but I think it's worth repeating: general purpose CPU cores are not becoming much faster. Learning to make your software run well on multiple cores seems to be a very sound investment.
- lovelearning 12y agoSome case studies of this here [1]. [1]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/mic-developer#pid-22612-1861 https://software.intel.com/en-us/mic-developer#pid-22612-186...
- tim333 12y agoThanks - I was curious what it was for. I see: - Black-Scholes Valuation Computing - Weather simulation fairly specialist number crunching I guess [update] I see the 'worlds fastest computer', Tianhe-2 uses 48,000 Xeon Phis. Wonder if they got a bulk discount? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2#Applications
- Coding_Cat 12y agoAn insanely low price relative to it's original price. Peronally, I still find this a very reasonable price (double it would still be decent), but normally they are heavily overpriced. It's hard to compare different devices of course, but in terms of pure FLOPS (and benchmarks) is roughly the same as an AMD r280x, which costs 240$ and allows you to play video-games in between your work. There is definitely a market for these cards I think, niche but it exists, however the normal price of >$2k is the old-fashioned "industry tax" (c.f. Tesla cards) and not a reflection of the actual performance.
- userbinator 12y agoand allows you to play video-games in between your work. That's what I was thinking too - if Intel just added the needed hardware for some video outputs, they could've produced a version which also works as a GPU, and might receive more interest.
- _wmd 12y agoXeon Phi is the successor of Larrabee, a GPU project that failed because it couldn't reach the power/performance to compete with GPUs of the time (only 4 years ago)
- rayiner 12y agoYou're comparing apples and oranges. The Xeon Phi has full-fledged x86 cores and 8GB of ECC memory. It's a much more flexible machine than any GPU.
- trsohmers 12y agoFull fledged? They are basically just scaled down P54C (P5 architecture from 1993) cores that have upgraded functional units, and you have 57 to 61 one them. Flexible, maybe, but not as generally useful unless you are explicitly writing code for it. A better buy would be an AMD APU, which for ~150-200 watts (compared to the 225-300 for the Phi, which requires a ~130W CPU to operate) can do roughly the same processing work with a little less onboard memory.
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- cpks 12y agoI'm a little confused about the value proposition here. This is about 60 CPUs at 1GHz with little memory and low IPC. Price, before promotion, is $2k, and after, $250. I can get an FX-9590 for $250, which has 8 cores, but running at 4.7GHz, and higher IPC. In terms of raw compute speed, it seems like the FX-9590 will be at least the same speed. But: * I can use standard programming tools. * I only distribute computes 8-ways, not 60-ways. That's easier. * Anything which is not easily made parallel is much faster. My experience is that there tends to be a lot of that. * I have less work to transfer data back and forth. For big data, that actually takes a fair bit of time. When would the Phi be faster? When would I want to use it?
- nkurz 12y agoIn terms of raw compute speed, it seems like the FX-9590 will be at least the same speed. They aren't really comparable. An FX-9590 at 4.7GHz is about 300 GFlops, but the the Xeon Phi 31S1P is slightly over 1 TFlop --- more than 3x as many floating point operations per second. The spec that probably shows the most difference is memory bandwidth. The FX-9590 with 1866 memory achieves 30GB/s. The Phi reaches 320GB/s, about 10 times as much. The presumption is that you might put 4 of these in a server, in addition to the standard processors. The price is actually quite a bit better, too, as some vendors are offering the Phi at $125 each in quantities of 10: http://www.colfax-intl.com/nd/xeonphi/31s1p-promo.aspx http://www.colfax-intl.com/nd/xeonphi/31s1p-promo.aspx This article offers some good information about cases where the Phi is a good (or bad) choice: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/330164/an-overview-of-programming-for-intel-xeon-processors-and-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors_1.pdf https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/33016... The short answer would be that the Phi might be the best choice in cases where you need to perform billions of energy efficient floating point operations on a working set small enough to fit in the cards RAM, where the degree of branching is such that a "normal" GPU would be inappropriate, and where the problem justifies considerable programmer time for optimization. Financial and scientific models are the usual examples.
- tormeh 12y agoOk, but if the normal price is 2000USD, then that leaves space for a lot of 9590s. You could get almost the same memory bandwidth and 3x as much processing power with 10 9590s. And remember that's floating point performance; the bulldozer architecture the 9590 is based on gives you about effectively 1.5x as many cores when doing integer operations. So, ok, the Phi is useful at the current price, but at the 2000USD price other people are talking about in the thread it seems pretty useless.
- norswap 12y agoWhat can I use this "coprocessor" for?
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- jvreeland 12y agoCoprocessors target audience has been for the most part HPC providers. If you're doing large numerical task or some huge amount of parallelism they can be incredibly useful. That being said there's a not insignificant amount of development time needed to properly use them.
- octotoad 12y agoDoes anybody know how these sorts of devices are presented to an operating system? Is it controlled/programmed in a similar manner to a modern GPGPU card?
- orbifold 12y agoThey run an embedded Linux operating system on the coprocessor, which in principle allows you to run programs on it, as if it were an ordinary albeit weird independent computer (see here https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/building-a-native-application-for-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/building-a-native-...). That is you can ssh on the device, etc. There are also various tools sold by Intel all with three digit price tags (I believe), that allow you to program with parallel directives for example and which translate that to something that runs on a xeon phi. You can also use OpenCL, in which case it presents itself as one of several OpenCL devices you can use.
- stefantalpalaru 12y agoPrevious submission, completely ignored: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8593125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8593125
- carlwarnick 12y agoYou buried the lead. The price was the important information.
- stefantalpalaru 12y agoWhenever I improve the title, it gets reverted back to the original. Whenever I point to a secondary source, it gets replace with the primary. When I use the primary source with the original title, it gets no votes.
- scottcanoni 12y agoHow good is it at Crypto Currency mining?
- forgotpasswd3x 12y agoMight be good for primecoin.
- comboy 12y agoLooking at GFlops, much worse than GPUs from few years back (and we are in the ASICs era now). Don't know about scrypt, but since there are also ASICs there, I would imagine cost and power usage per hashrate would be not even comparable.
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- zoba 12y agoThe Xeon Phi looks really awesome, and I'd love to be able to have that many cores at my disposal...however, as far as I can tell, its not at all like have 57 cores on your current computer. Whereas in my current software (Ruby, Haskell programs) I can just specify the number of threads to create to parallelize my software further, I'm not really sure how I'd use the Phi.
- khebbie 12y agoA really dumb question: Would it be usable for running some kind of virtual machine, like ubuntu in virtual box or vagrant?
- ams6110 12y agoNo
- khebbie 12y agoCraps, it would have been so cool to buy a 200 usd extension for your computer and have a mega virtual machine...
- abronan 12y agoI stumbled upon this tutorial: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/54/8b/Kernel-based_KVM.pdf https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/54/8b... it seems that you can at least assign co-processors to KVM virtual machines.
- patrickg_zill 12y agoI seem to recall a case where someone used a GPU to handle index lookups or some other part of query processing for a database, on a GPU. I wonder if this could be used for that purpose.
- discardorama 12y agoIs the deal over? Amazon lists it for $499 now.
- danellis 12y agoCan Blender Cycles use this? Looks like there was talk about it in 2012/3, but nothing recently.
- myrryr 12y agoIn 1997 there was a supercomputer called ASCI Red. It had 76 cabinets of processors. The entire thing (with memory and disk) took up 1600 sq feet of floor space. Here we are 17 years later, and we can get the same processing power in a pci card.
- sah88 12y agoKnight Landing, the second version, is supposed to be coming out in early 2015. If you want to get one be warned you might need a special motherboard as well if you were thinking of tossing it in a consumer box. http://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2013/08/06/Will-your-motherboard-work-with-Intel-Xeon-Phi-490/ http://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2013/08/06/Will-your-mother... Here is a link to Intel's promotion page it has participating vendors in various locations: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/special-promotion-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor-31s1p https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/special-promotion-...
- trsohmers 12y agoWon't be until the second half of 2015... We should have a better estimate come ISC in June, and my bet is on a release in November of 2015 to coincide with SC15.
- Xcelerate 12y agoIs there a cheap way to connect this to my Macbook pro? I do a lot of MD simulations, and this would be great to play around with when I don't want to use research funded computing time, but I feel like the connection to my laptop could end up being more expensive than the board itself.
- nitrogen 12y agoYou can probably find a Thunderbolt-connected PCIe enclosure, but the bandwidth from host memory to card memory will be lower than a direct connection. Drivers would be another issue.
- rdc12 12y agoI would be really tempted if I can find a computer capable of running it on the cheap (student). I think my current desktop may work, if I remove the video card and use the integrated graphics...
- soylentcola 12y agoI just checked and these are on the list of unsupported processors for Cinema 4D. Are there any uses for this sort of thing in other 3d rendering applications or is it not suited to that kind of thing? Only asking because there are still a lot of rendering engines that don't leverage GPU but $250 for a good chunk of rendering power would be a great alternative to building a dedicated render farm for someone like me who does it more for art/creative projects and not so much for a living. Right now my options are just continuing to use my standard consumer workstation, building a small render farm, or purchasing (and adapting to) a GPU-accelerated renderer. I'm certainly no expert on this stuff but I'm always on the lookout for affordable ways to make my projects easier to work with.