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An 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

An 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 ago
and 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 ago
  Xeon 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 ago
You'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 ago
  Full 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.
- Marat_Dukhan 12y ago
  I wouldn't call Xeon Phi x86: - It doesn't support CMOV, MMX, SSE, AVX, and all other ISA extensions the popped up after the original Pentium. - It does not use standard System V x86-64 ABI. - Most of its compute power is due to special vector instruction set, that is not compatible with any previous or future x86 ISA (including AVX-512). - The only fully supported compiler is Intel Compiler (icc). And in my opinion, its code-generation quality for Xeon Phi is far worse than for other Intel architectures. - The only supported assembler is GAS. No NASM, no YASM. - Most debugging and profiling utilities (that run fine on normal x86 cores) are not supported on Xeon Phi. This includes valgrind, Address Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, and even memory profiling options in Intel compiler. Given these limitations, how does it help that Xeon Phi is x86-based?
  - rayiner 12y ago
    It handles branching and memory access like a conventional x86 core.

userbinator 12y ago

and 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 ago
Xeon 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 ago

You'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 ago
Full 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.
Marat_Dukhan 12y ago
I wouldn't call Xeon Phi x86: - It doesn't support CMOV, MMX, SSE, AVX, and all other ISA extensions the popped up after the original Pentium. - It does not use standard System V x86-64 ABI. - Most of its compute power is due to special vector instruction set, that is not compatible with any previous or future x86 ISA (including AVX-512). - The only fully supported compiler is Intel Compiler (icc). And in my opinion, its code-generation quality for Xeon Phi is far worse than for other Intel architectures. - The only supported assembler is GAS. No NASM, no YASM. - Most debugging and profiling utilities (that run fine on normal x86 cores) are not supported on Xeon Phi. This includes valgrind, Address Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, and even memory profiling options in Intel compiler. Given these limitations, how does it help that Xeon Phi is x86-based?
- rayiner 12y ago
  It handles branching and memory access like a conventional x86 core.